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
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