I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:
In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:
For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as
nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the
rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning
to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center
the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel,
perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in
"Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the
consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my
own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my
independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself
with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)
And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.
AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone.
And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:
Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena
John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le
Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna
Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance Novels. Heinrich
Heine University Duesseldorf.
Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels."
Journal of Popular Romance Studies
14.
Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025).
“Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The
Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love,
Theoretically (2023).” REDEN.
Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos,
6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]
Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels.
PhD,
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]
Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre.
Honours Dissertation,
Seattle Pacific University.
Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.
Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of
the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and
Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]
- Farooqui, Javaria
(2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.
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- Hodson,
Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional
Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism".
New
Horizons in Prescriptivism Research,
edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier
Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters:
103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]
-
Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "
The
Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC
Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988."
Contemporary Women's Writing
19. [Abstract available
here and excerpts
here.]
Lancaster, Guy (2025).
"
‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child."
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
56.1:25–36. [Details
here.]
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- Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025).
"Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors."
Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]
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- Sutton, Denise H. (2025).
“Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and
Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]
- Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.
-
-
- Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026
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- Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual
Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and
Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in
Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies.
[More details here.]