Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Time for a Change
I've been blogging at Teach Me Tonight since June 2006 and in that time the study of popular romance has come a long way. When we started, there was really very little academic writing about romance available online. Now we have the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, a number of people post about romance from an academic perspective on their personal blogs and, as Laurie Kahn recently noted, at the Popular Romance Project “Sarah Frantz and Eric Selinger have been commissioning and editing unpaid essays by scholars all over the world about popular romance (from a dazzling range of perspectives) for the section of the blogsite called 'Talking About Romance.'” The Popular Romance Project has just secured $58,669 via Kickstarter as well as a $616,000 production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (in addition to a variety of other, smaller, grants) so I assume that its website will continue to provide "unpaid essays by scholars all over the world about popular romance" for some time.
This being so, it seemed to me to be time to re-evaluate what I was doing here at Teach Me Tonight. One thing that TMT provides which JPRS and the PRP do not, is frequent updates about recent publications, forthcoming conferences, calls for papers etc. I'd like to continue posting about those things here. If you have news of that sort which you'd like to see at TMT, please let me know.
From now on I'll be taking my more general and/or analytical posts over to a new blog at my own website. I hope you'll join me there; given the sometimes inexplicable way that Blogger works (or doesn't) I'm hoping it'll be simpler for readers to post comments there than it is here. The new blog's still very much a work in progress but the first post is now up and I have an rss feed.
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The study of popular romance has indeed come a long way in the past six years, Laura, and you're one of the main reasons why.
ReplyDeleteYour writing here has been so thoughtful and interesting, post after post, year after year, that I'm really in awe of what you've accomplished, and at every IASPR and PCA conference I meet someone new who's come to the study of the genre through your work at the blog.
I'll be following your work at the new blog, and trying to live up to your example here--and I look forward to teaching your book again as soon as my next romance course rolls around.
Bon voyage! And thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making Teach Me Tonight such a wonderful site.
Thanks, Eric. That's really sweet of you.
DeleteI've been gradually drifting towards this change in the content of my posts at TMT as (a) there have been more and more events and new publications to report on and (b) as I tried to find ways to showcase other people's work. This is a group blog and I've always felt it was intended to provide snapshots of what's going on in the field; it was never intended to be primarily one person's personal blog.
I've been following LauraV's work for many years now. It was due to TMT that I realized that romance was even been studied academically. It's through her work for TMT that I "met" Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz and have been following the scholarly work of these three people. So, thank you, LauraV, and I'll be reading your other blog.
ReplyDeleteKeira, I'm really glad I've been a link to other romance scholars and I hope you'll enjoy the posts at my new blog.
DeleteLooking forward to your new blog!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Victoria! I haven't worked out exactly what I'll write about there. It'll mostly be about romances, I expect, but I'm looking forward to the possibility of sometimes posting about things which I come across in my secondary reading which are only indirectly related to romance/romantic fiction.
ReplyDeleteI am a bit behind, having been immersed in editing but I will sign up for the new blog now! Love your posts, as you know.
ReplyDelete