Deadlines! Deadlines! Deadlines!

--Eric Selinger

If it's the last week of November, then deadlines must approaching--and, indeed, there are three quite soon that readers of this blog will want to know.

The first is for the Popular Culture Association's annual conference, which will be held next March 27-30 in Washington, D.C.  As you saw in a post a few days ago, the Vampires in Literature and Culture area has caught the romance bug, and they have a CFP on Paranormal Romance.  We at the Romance area, meanwhile, have our usual wide-open CFP--all love!  all romance!  anytime, anywhere, any medium!--and if you're teaching anything related to romance, we may have a special roundtable or panel on romance and pedagogy as well, so get in touch.  Former area chair Sarah Frantz, meanwhile, has doffed her romance  cap and put on...well, I'm not sure where this metaphor goes, but she's leading a new BDSM/Kink/Fetish Studies area, and they've got a CFP as well.

The deadline for all three of those PCA calls is this Friday, November 30, so don't miss out!  Proposals of 200-300 words go through the general PCA portal, here.

The second deadline you need to know is Saturday, December 1.  That's the final day when you can submit a grant proposal for the RWA Academic Research Grant:  up to $5000 USD, as I posted a few days ago.  Full details here.

Finally, I want to call your attention to a Call for Papers right here in my home town, Chicago.  The "Space Between" society, which studies "Literature and Culture, 1914-1945," is having its annual international conference at DePaul University from June 20-22, 2013, and the theme for this year is play, broadly considered.  I'd love to see some romance representation at the conference.  How about some talks on Georgette Heyer, a playful author, surely?  How about romance in P.G. Wodehouse? Anything playful in The Sheik or its reception?  Any parodies out there, or comic revisions?

Plenty of opportunities here for romance scholarship, and it would be a shame to miss them.  (Also, Chicago's a wonderful city in the summer--and the end of June shouldn't be too hot.)

The deadline is Friday, December 7, a week after the PCA one.  There's still plenty of time to work up an abstract of 300 words or less.  For more information, you can see the full CFP here.