Arkansas Romance

I recently received an email from Guy Lancaster who works for the Central Arkansas Library System:

I edit the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Among other things, I've been trying to ensure that we develop entries on any professionally published work of fiction set in Arkansas, including romance novels. You can find many of them just doing a search for the word "romance" on our site: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/?s=romance

I thought I'd share that with readers of the blog, in case some of you have a particular liking for/research interest in romances set in Arkansas.

CFP: Romantasy

 CFP Edited Collection: Feral: Romantasy and Its Readers

Editors: Kacy Tillman, University of Tampa, kacytillman@gmail.com
Sarah Walden, Baylor University, Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu

Proposals Due: June 30, 2025

 

This will be a book-length, peer-reviewed volume, and we plan to market it as a trade publication with the University of Iowa Press. We are committed to diverse representations of texts and fan experiences, especially given that the genre is often criticized (rightly so) for centering white, cishet women. This collection will include chapters on queer romantasy, romantasy and disability, romantasy and book bans, romantasy and race, and more. This is a highly interdisciplinary collection, so we encourage a variety of approaches.

We are currently looking for chapters that explore any of the following topics:
● Representations of race and ethnicity in romantasy
● Romantasy reception and BIPOC booktok creators 
● Adult readers of YA romantasy
● Romantasy and colonialism

 

Submission Guidelines: Please send the following to BOTH kacytillman@gmail.com and
Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu.
● Contact Information (name, email, phone, and preferred method of contact)
● Working title
● 200-word abstract
● Short professional bio
● Note on whether any of this research has been previously published

New Publications: Readers and Relationships

Here's a list of the latest publications on romance which I've come across:

Cassady, Zoe A., Laura Crisp and Corrine M. Wickens, 2025. “Struggling in the Heartland: Romance Novels and Rural Adolescent Identity of Failure.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Online First. [Abstract here.] 

Dahy, Faten Abdelaziz (2025). "Love-Bombing, Gaslighting, and Hoovering: A Psychological Study of Selected Romance Novels by Colleen Hoover." Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 6.3:56-75.

Rizkyane Machmuri, Alya, Yuyun Nurulaen & Pepen Priyawan (2025). "Romance Formula in Zoulfa Katouh’s Novel As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow." ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8.1: 224–234. 

Rowe, Simone 2025. “The Map to Black Love: The Information Behaviours of Black Readers Seeking Romance Books With Black Character Representation”. The IJournal: Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 10 (2). Toronto, Canada: 107–120.

Swanson, Alexandra (2025). "“Bluebeard’s Castle”: Reconsidering Romance and Revenge in Netflix’s You". #MeToo TV: Essays on Streaming Rape Culture. Ed. Ralph Beliveau and Lisa Funnell. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 101-110. [Excerpt here. I had some concerns about the framing of this, which I discuss in the Romance Scholarship Database.]

Tristanty, Anggie Ayu Isra and Johny Alfian Khusyairi (2025). "Mass-produced romance: BookTok society and the homogenisation of literary culture." Jurnal Studi Komunikasi 9.1:249-260. [Details and some concerns about the works cited here.]

CFP: Conference Session Sponsored by the University of Tasmania

ROMANCING ACADEMIA: PLACING ROMANCE

Friday 22 August 2025

Wrest Point, Tasmania

 

The concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies, driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia 2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry. In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are together often described by readers and writers using the spatial metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place (2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations – place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and scholarly engagement.

Proposed papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as ‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not limited to): 

• “Romancelandia” and its different characteristics 
• Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
• Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
• Food as a metaphor for place 
• Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
• Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
• Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
• Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
• Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
• The place of romance in public libraries 

We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 16th May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.

 

More details here: https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2025-romance-writers-of-australia-conference/romancing-academia

CFP: Essay Collection on Laura Kinsale

From Alexandra Vasti:

Not One Word But True: Romance Authors and Scholars on Laura Kinsale

USA Today bestselling romance novelist and literature professor Alexandra Vasti is seeking abstract submissions for an edited collection of essays on New York Times bestselling romance novelist Laura Kinsale.

Over her thirty-year career as a RITA-award-winning writer of historical romance, Laura Kinsale produced twelve expansive and genre-defining novels. From the Medieval Hearts series with its extraordinary Middle English dialogue to the textual representation of receptive and expressive aphasia in Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s novels pushed at the edges of the romance genre both thematically and formally, challenging and upending its most familiar tropes for her devoted audience of millions of readers.

In this collection of essays, bestselling romance authors including Olivia Waite, Alexandra Vasti, and Freya Marske will reflect on Kinsale’s impact on the genre as a whole, as well as their own personal relationships with Kinsale’s work. From essays on metaphor, symbolism, and sentence construction to larger considerations of Kinsale’s immense global and chronological range, these authors will explore Kinsale’s work and contextualize her novels within the scope of romance currently being written and published.

In addition, scholars of romance are invited to consider Kinsale’s work from a critical lens. Her novels frequently include Orientalist stereotypes and villainous representations of queer men, even as she repeatedly challenges, undermines, and flips those tropes. Her complex portrayals of trauma and disability precede and precipitate conversations about those topics in the genre. And her own critical engagement with gender in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) is frequently reiterated and challenged by authors and readers today.

These collected essays will invite renewed consideration of one of the defining authors of the genre, aimed at new and long-time romance readers, creative writing students, and teachers and scholars of romance. We anticipate that the collection will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.

Interested essayists are invited to contribute essays on single or multiple books within Kinsale’s oeuvre. Topics might include:

• Kinsale’s work in the context of 21st-century romance novels

• War and trauma

• Orientalism

• Gender and gender performance

• Sexuality, particularly representations of queer characters

• Sex, kink, and power

• Disability

• Language use, especially her use of vernaculars, accents, and Middle English

• Genre

At this stage, interested scholars are invited to submit a title, abstract, and brief bio for consideration. Once the book proposal is accepted, final dates for the essay submission (4000-8000 words) will be set. 

Please send materials to Alexandra Vasti at alex@alexandravasti.com by May 31, 2025.