Academics at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference 2016

Laura Vivanco

With thanks to Dr Jodi McAlister who drew attention to this on Twitter.

According to the Romance Writers of Australia:

The 25^th Annual Romance Writers of Australia Conference will be held in Adelaide 2016.

Ain’t Love Grand will be held from 19 – 21 August 2016 at the Stamford Grand Hotel located at vibrant Glenelg, only a few minutes from the city centre.

As an additional bonus, we have partnered with Flinders University of South Australia to deliver an academic stream.

On Twitter they mentioned that this "academic stream" "will include Professor Catherine Roach, Dr Danijela Kakavaskovic" (tweet) and Professor "James McGoldrick" (tweet).

Catherine Roach, whose “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy” was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

also writes historical romance fiction under the pen name Catherine LaRoche; her first e-novel Master of Love was published by Simon & Schuster in 2012 and Knight of Love followed in 2014. [...]

Currently, she is writing about her experience of becoming a romance novelist in a general audience academic book on how the story of romance — “find your one true love” — is the most powerful narrative at work in popular culture. Entitled Happily Ever After, the book is forthcoming from Indiana University Press later in 2015. (Roach)

I couldn't find any details about a Dr Danijela Kakavaskovic but I wonder it there was a typo in the tweet and the name should be Dr Danijela Kambaskovic, who

is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. She is a former a lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at UWA. She has published widely in the fields of genre history and history of ideas and is an award-winning poet. (History of Emotions)

I also had problems identifying Professor James McGoldrick. There is one who co-authors novels under the name "May McGoldrick":

Nikoo McGoldrick, a mechanical engineer, and James McGoldrick, a professor of English with a Ph.D. in sixteenth-century British literature, collaborate in life as well as in literature. Writing under the name May McGoldrick, they produce historical novels for Penguin- Putnam, and Young Adult Highland romances for HarperCollins/Avon.

Under the name of Jan Coffey, they write contemporary suspense thrillers for MIRA. ("Jan" is an acronym for "Jim and Nikoo; "Coffey" is Nikoo's maiden name.) (NAL)