Call for Papers: Academics at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference (August 2016)

Ain’t Love Grand

Romance Writers’ of Australia & Flinders University

Love and Romance Conference

Stamford Grand Hotel, Adelaide, South Australia

August 18-21, 2016

Flinders University is partnering with the Romance Writers of Australia to deliver two peer-reviewed academic streams at the Romance Writers of Australia national conference in August 2016. One stream will be focussed on Historical Representations of Love; the second will be for Popular Romance Studies. The Love Research Cluster for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Studies are partners for these streams and we aim to bring together a diverse and dynamic community of researchers on love and romance.

Love is central in the personal, social, and political construction of how we understand, organise, categorise, and measure our relationships. For historians, cultural theorists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and literary scholars it is not possible to understand our areas without some understanding of the role of love. For Romance writers, it is the centre of their narratives. This is an increasingly reciprocal relationship. Writers use the work of scholars to give their work immediacy and accuracy, while scholars use popular depictions to explain cultural difference or illustrate cultural paradigms both in their work and their teaching. This conference aims to bring together those who create representations of love, sex, and romance with those who study them through its transdisciplinary academic stream, ‘Historical Representations of Love’ and its popular romance specific stream ‘Popular Romance Studies’.

Keynote Speakers at the conference will be:

• Professor Catherine Roach (New College, University of Alabama)
• Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)
• Dr Danijela Kambaskovic (University of Western Australia)

Deadline for Submission of Papers is Monday 29 February, 2016. Send to: amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au

More details can be found here and for further information please contact: Dr Amy Matthews (amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au) and Dr Erin Sebo (erin.sebo@flinders.edu.au)