The theme for IASPR 27 is Choosing Love,
which marks our decision to turn toward hope in a world that is
increasingly shaped by the lingering trauma of a global pandemic,
ongoing wars, and deepening economic precarity. Popular romance
narratives insist, quietly and defiantly, that better futures are not
only imaginable but worth fighting for. We are keen to explore what it
means to choose love as romance readers and scholars. As bell hooks
reminds us: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing
one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is
an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also
implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Popular
romance is a literature of will as it imagines characters who choose
connection over isolation, commitment over cynicism, and care over
cruelty, often against considerable odds.
We invite submissions that engage with the
theme of Choosing Love broadly and creatively. Possible topics include,
but are not limited to:
Hope as resistance
Care, ethics and romantic love
Love in contexts of war, displacement, illness, and precarity
HEA (happily ever after) and HFN (happy for now) as ideological stances
Post pandemic romance
Choosing love and identity
Decolonial and global romance
Love and civic power
Love as world-building [speculative/ paranormal/ historical romance]
Adaptation / romance across genres
Finding and discovering love IRL and online
Publishing romance
Why readers choose romance
While our theme focuses on love, we are
also open to papers that take different approaches to romance. In short,
if it is about romance, we’re interested!
More details can be found here. Abstracts should be submitted by November 30, 2026.
Registration has opened for the 2025 IASPR Conference. The conference is being held in Mexico City from 24-25 June. There's both an in-person and hybrid option and you don't have to be a member of IASPR to attend.
Early Bird registration rates apply until February 28th, 2025.
Regular registration will last from 1 March until 6 June, 2025.
Romantic Regions: Call for Papers, IASPR Conference 2025
We are now inviting submissions for the 2025 International
Association for the Study of Popular Romance Conference. It will take
place from June 24-26 2025 at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in
Mexico City, with a Zoom option for people unable to attend in person.
We are accepting submissions for papers, panels, or workshops delivered
in English or Spanish.
Our theme for the 2025 IASPR conference is Romantic Regions, thinking
through the evolving relationships between romance, place, and space. [...]
Submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words, by November 30, 2024
CFP: Romance Area, Conference of the Popular Culture Association (2025)
Romance Area
Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
April 16-19, 2025 – New Orleans, Louisiana
Disrobing the Trope
It does not take an expert to see how important tropes currently are
in the marketing of romantic media. Whether we’re talking about friends
who find themselves in an only-one-bed situation (and thus become
lovers), or enemies forced to fake date (and thus become lovers), or a
grump who gets a second chance (to become lovers) with their sunshine-y
childhood sweetheart, tropes have become ubiquitous to the way romance
narratives are discussed.
In the Romance area of PCA, however, we are experts—and
thus, for this year’s conference, we’d like to provoke people to think
through and theorize the trope in popular romantic media. [...]
Submit 250-word abstracts to pcaaca.org by November 30, 2024
IASPR is holding a Valentine's Day (well, Wednesday 14 February for some time zones) Romance Wikithon, with training from Amy Burge! It's not just for romance scholars: readers have lots of expertise to share too! Here's the description that was shared with those of us on the IASPR Discord group:
Join us, this Valentines Day, to share our expertise as romance scholars [and readers] and increase the representation of romance on Wikipedia! Open to all.
This 90-minute session will be practical and informal. It is aimed at those who have never edited Wikipedia before. Training and guidance will be given.
Recommended for those who might be interested in using Wikipedia as part of teaching, for those who are interested in learning more about how to edit Wikipedia, and for anyone who would like to make positive change in the world!
The session will be facilitated by Dr Amy Burge, who has run editathons at the University of Cardiff, and has used Wikipedia for assessment with students.
The IASPR conference starts tomorrow and the schedule (with abstracts of the papers to be presented) is available for download here: https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/schedule-romance-revitalised/ . The topics for the various panels include: Booktok, Black Romance, Historical Romance, Love Studies, Paranormal Romance, Queer Romance and much more!
The conference will also see the launch of Jayashree Kamblé's new book, Creating Identity The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (which you can read more about here).
In addition, this week only, the ebook version of Publishing Romance Fiction in the Philippines by Jodi McAlister, Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad, which was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press, is available for free download here.
Here's a list of some other recent publications:
Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [At the time of adding this to the list, the 2023 volume of this journal wasn't yet available online.]
Burge, Amy
(2023).
"Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction."
Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got To Do With It?
Ed. Madalena Grobbelaar, Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Debra Dudek. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 39-49. [Abstract]
Phipps, Catherine (2023). "‘The Machine for Showing Desire’: Desert Romance Fiction and Knowing Sexual Desire." Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison and Pälvi Rantala. New York: Routledge. [Abstract and Excerpt]
The full schedule of the 2023 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance is now online. The conference itself is taking place from 28-30 June.
Allan, Jonathan A.
(2023).
"Softcore romance: on naked heroes and beefcakes in popular romance novels."**** Studies. [Some quotes and link here. I'm trying to avoid getting caught in a Blogger filter so I'm starring out words I think might trigger it.]
Davisson, Amber and Kyra Hunting (2023).
"
From private pleasure to erotic spectacle: Adapting Bridgerton to female audience desires." Journal of Popular Television
11.1:7-25. [I've not been able to access this, but the abstract can be found here. It's part of a special issue about the television version of the Bridgerton novels.]
[The
dissertation is partly a discussion of two surveys carried out in
2016/2017, one with romance readers and the other with romance authors,
with a view to understanding their attitudes towards feminism. The full
dissertation is available via a link provided on the page to which I've
linked above.]
Reed, Eleanor
(2023).
Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958: Making Homemakers
Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press. [More details here.]
Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten Bray, Neha Kumar, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2023. “It Takes (at least) Two: The Work to Make Romance Work.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
This discusses the work involved in self-publishing romance. It notes that:
While white participants reported using pen-names to separate their writer identity from their personal one, our participants of color undertook much more significant identity management. In addition to adopting white-sounding pen names, they mentioned about how race influenced their story lines and characters. Digital platforms, and the need they create for writers to engage with readers, surface questions of how they become arenas in which some are excluded while others are privileged based on whether it is possible for everyone to engage equally (e.g. whether everyone can use video for conversations). [...] Romance novelists continue to confront issues of racism within the community, and our research suggests another dimension to this reckoning, which shows how the tools writers use perpetuate or even exacerbate discrimination.
Wells, Juliette (2022). "Afterword: Sex, Romance, and Representation in Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last." Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond. Ed. Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim. University of Rochester Press. Rochester, NY. 243-252. [Some quotes and links here.]
The closing date for early-bird registration for the IASPR conference is 31 March. There's a hybrid as well as an in-person option.
The BBC has published an article with the annoying premise that, as the most formulaic genre of popular fiction, romance is presumably the most at risk of being produced by artificial intelligence. However, the article does also mention that
Last year, sales of romantic fiction in the US shot up by 52.4%, compared with an increase of just 8.5% for adult fiction overall.
Sexual fantasy and wish fulfillment is all over the place in romance.
But while wish fulfillment and smoothing out rough edges (I mean, is
douching sexy? Apparently not, because—while showers are prolific—these
guys never do it.) is one indisputable component of genre romance, it
also often contributes to certain groups of readers feeling invisible.
Fantasy is great and all, but sometimes it would be nice also to stop
the barrage of input that maybe something’s broken because one hasn’t
met one’s perfect Romance Novel Partner yet, and that’s why one
struggles to orgasm / doesn’t enjoy penetration / doesn’t enjoy sex at
all / fill in the blank.
And on the topic of inaccuracies/fantasies, Scientific American offers a reminder that wolves generally do not behave the way that shifter/werewolf romances imply they do: "The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf,
comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs are
simply families."
This year's issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies has begun to appear online, and includes:
McDade, Monique
(2023).
California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal.
Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press. [There is a chapter on Eva Rutland, and though the focus is not on her romance novels, this is the first significant academic work about her. See the RSDB for more details.]
From the IASPR website. Note that this is Birmingham in the UK, just in case anyone was confused.
The ninth annual international conference on popular romance studies:
Romance Revitalised
Birmingham, June 28-30 2023
Proposal deadline: December 31, 2022
This will be the first meeting of the International Association for the
Study of Popular Romance in five years. In this time, the world has
changed significantly: how we live, and, as a result, how we love.
In the spirit of renewal, the theme for the 2023 IASPR
conference is a broad one. We are open to proposals for papers, posters
and panels on anything to do with the popular culture of romantic love,
now and in the past, from any discipline, from anywhere in the world.
Popular Romance Studies is an interdisciplinary field,
including (but not limited to) scholars from literary studies; film,
television, and media studies; communication and the social sciences;
critical race, feminist, queer and disability studies; audience &
fan studies, etc. All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome,
including talks, panels, and workshops on professional development,
international collaboration, and pedagogy. Content creators, writers,
and professionals from various romance industries are invited to submit
proposals as well.
Submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words, to conferences@iaspr.org by December 31, 2022. Please specify whether you are proposing a paper, workshop, or poster. Panel submissions (3-4 related papers) are welcome.
We are currently investigating the possibility of a hybrid
conference. Please indicate whether you would be interested in this
option.
If you do not have a permanent academic job at a university
(eg. a PhD student, contingent staff, an independent researcher), or are
an untenured Assistant Professor, you may be eligible for the Kathleen
Seidel Travel Grant. Please note if you wish to receive more information
about this opportunity.
.@dramyburge and I are in the very early stages of some work on the history and development of British romance fiction, and as you can see, we have a lot of very interesting ground to cover... https://t.co/X7IPjCKNSZ
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR)
is seeking a Secretary to join our Executive Committee. This is a
volunteer position, with a two-year term.
They're also looking for a Film and Television Editor, Journal for Popular Romance Studies. Details about that can be found here (and the deadline's 30 July).
If you're not already signed up to IASPR's quarterly newletter, I'd encourage you to do that here (where you can also see the newsletter's archive). This quarter's newsletter includes a link to PCA Romance Area 2022 Abstract Booklet which I don't think was available online during the event and an interview with the new IASPR President (congratulations Jayashree and I look forward to seeing your ideas come to fruition!)
Balteskard, Susanna
(2022).
Feminism in Romance: How the romance genre has(n't) changed since the 1950s.
Bachelor thesis,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. [Abstract only.]
Buttrick, Nicholas
Westgate, Erin C.
Oishi, Shigehiro
(2022).
"Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Online First. [A preprint version is available for free online - see the links in the romance scholarship database entry I've linked to]
Namysłowska, Karolina
(2022).
Romance novels in translation: Focus on defining features of selected texts translated from English into Polish.
Masters thesis,
Jagiellonian University. [Abstract]
Also, since I was sent a free copy of New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, I've been able to update the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database about it to include quotes that give a flavour of each essay.
news on conferences, grants and fellowships, recent and forthcoming
publications, as well as other items relevant to our members and the
community of scholars, writers, and readers interested in the
interdisciplinary study of popular romance.
IASPR's new, quarterly newletter aims to provide that.
María Ramos-García
Transatlantic Definitions of Whiteness in Louise Bergstrom’s Gothic Romances in the Canary Islands (1971-72)
Heather Schell
Love in a White Climate: Category Romance and the Anglosphere
Angela Toscano
Big Girls Don’t Cry or Get the Guy: Representations of Fatness in Romance Andrea Anne I. Trinidad
“Kilig to the Bones!”: Kilig as the backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance has issued a statement, available on their website, which I copy below in full:
IASPR Statement on the Romance Writers of America
For over a
decade, the Romance Writers of America has been a generous sponsor of IASPR.
Every conference we have held has received RWA support, including our upcoming
2020 conference on “Diversity, Inclusion, Innovation” in popular romance
culture, and the field of popular romance studies has been seeded and sustained
by the RWA Academic Research Grant program.
However, in light
of recent
events we as a scholarly organization must add our voice to the chorus of
readers, reviewers, editors, agents, and authors who have called for sweeping
and lasting change at the RWA, beginning with the eight steps listed in the “Readers to RWA”
letter from Romance Sparks Joy:
A clear, unequivocal statement that RWA is anti-racist and that
all of its policies, procedures, and activities will ensure that the
organization meets this standard.
A public apology to Ms. Milan,
the Board members who have been compelled by their consciences to
resign this week, and members who have been harmed by the RWA as stated
above.
The resignations of President/President-Elect Damon Suede and Executive Director Carol Ritter.
An emergency election of new Directors to replace those who have resigned in protest.
A
full, transparent, and independent investigation into the complaint,
investigation, and censure processes around RWA’s Code of Ethics, with
attention to events related to the complaints against Ms. Milan and
reports that ethics complaints by marginalized members were not
forwarded to the Ethics Committee by RWA staff.
An accounting of
the actions that led to the creation of a secret ethics committee and
the Board’s initial vote against Ms. Milan.
The removal of staff
if investigations demonstrate those staff members discriminated against
marginalized authors based on their identities, whether intentionally
or through negligence.
An Action Plan developed with public
input to address the systematic exclusion, harassment, and lack of
support for marginalized members and prospective members at every level
of RWA, including chapters, conferences and events, staff prerogatives,
and Board action.
In keeping with that letter’s call for a “boycott of any events
sponsored by or affiliated with the national chapter of RWA,” and in
order to forestall any use of our conference to whitewash problems with
diversity and inclusion at RWA itself, we will budget for, plan, and, if
necessary, hold our 2020 conference this summer without using the
financial support that RWA has provided for it. We will reallocate
resources and seek out other funding in order to minimize the impact of
this decision on travel support for graduate students, untenured
faculty, and independent scholars.
We do not flatter
ourselves that IASPR, our conferences, and our affiliate publication, the Journal
of Popular Romance Studies are somehow free from racism, exclusion, and
inequity, or that we will always succeed in addressing them. We do, however, hope
to respond to our failures by keeping in mind the advice that Prof. Jay Thalang
gives his graduate students—and, ultimately, takes to heart—in Courtney Milan’s
Hold Me:
“If you can’t get over your ego
and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four
times as long. You failed. Get used to it. Some of the biggest
scientific breakthroughs came about because someone failed and figured
out why. Don’t worry about failing. Worry about failing wrongly.”
So far in this matter RWA has not just failed, but failed wrongly. We
ask for better from them, and will try to do better ourselves. We hope
all organizations, including RWA, are able to embrace policy and
practice that sees and represents all of their talent.
The Eighth International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
Diversity, Inclusion, Innovation
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Canary Islands | June 17-19, 2020
Proposal Deadline: October 20, 2019
Whose loves matter in popular romance culture? Who is represented as
capable of love, or worthy of it? How do popular romance media—books,
films, TV, web series, popular music, comics, etc.—promote and/or resist
(neo) imperialism, (neo) colonialism, white supremacy,
ethno-nationalism, ableism, and compulsory heterosexuality? How do
innovations in publishing and media creation and/or distribution help to
diversify popular romance, making it more inclusive, and what
innovations are needed in popular romance studies to bring this
diversity—or its continuing absence—into our critical discourse?
Celebrating the start of its second decade, the International
Association for the Study of Popular Romance calls for papers and
posters on the popular culture of romantic love, now and in the past,
from anywhere in the world.
Popular Romance Studies is an interdisciplinary field including
scholars from literary studies; film, television, and media studies;
communication and the social sciences; critical race, feminist, and
queer studies; disability studies; audience & fan studies, etc. All
theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including talks,
panels, and workshops on professional development, international
collaboration, and pedagogy. Content creators, writers, and
professionals from various romance industries are invited to submit
proposals as well.
We are open to proposals on any relevant text or topic. This year we
are particularly interested in papers, posters, panels, and workshops
focused on issues related to diversity, inclusion, and innovation.
Possible topics might include:
Social justice themes and efforts at broadening popular romance
media, including issues related to race, sexuality, gender, class,
disability, age, religion, etc.
Love and romance in the context of mass migration and displacement.
Popular romance in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
Romance beyond the Anglosphere: traditions, texts, translations (literal and metaphorical).
Changes in romance genres and innovations in popular romance creation, marketing, and sales.
Resistance to change in popular romance.
Popular romance media communities and controversies.
Panels on individual authors/creators and individual texts (books, series, films, shows, etc.)
Submit abstracts of 250-350 words (plus bibliography of 3-5 items, if appropriate) to conferences@iaspr.org by October 20, 2019. Please specify whether you are proposing a paper, workshop, or poster. Panel submissions (3-4 related papers) are welcome.
Thanks to the generosity of Kathleen Gilles Seidel, a limited number
of Seidel Travel Support grants will be awarded to non-tenured
presenters, including graduate students and junior scholars. Information
about travel support applications will be sent out with acceptance
notifications.
The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.
Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) SEE THREAD
There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.
Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) SEE THREAD
Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.
Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.
Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney) SEE THREAD
A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.
Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread
There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast
Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister: SEE THREAD
Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.
Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.
Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are
disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with
nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be
harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a
whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.
Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.
Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) SEE THREAD
Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.
Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.
Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.
And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.
Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.
Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.
Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.
Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.
The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.
Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.
Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.
Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College) SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.
Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”
and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.
Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)
Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt
For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"
SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"
The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra
Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD
The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”
The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.
Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.
Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.
Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance
—
the ideal place to explore gender and
love” can be found here.
María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.
I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that
A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made
the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at
Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and
leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon
Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically
WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and
pillagers. Convinced me completely.
Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.
On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:
Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels
The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by
Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?
The deadline for proposals is September 15, 2017. The Call for Papers can be found here.
Thanks to a generous donation from American romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel, travel support for junior scholars will be available for “Think
Globally, Love Locally,” the Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance.
This Seidel Travel Grant is intended to foster the
future of scholarship on romance in genre fiction, film, TV, and other
forms of popular culture by helping with travel costs for graduate
students, non-tenured faculty (tenure stream or
contingent / adjunct), and independent scholars attending the 2018
IASPR conference in Sydney, Australia.
Eligible scholars whose proposals have been
accepted for the conference may apply for the Seidel Travel Grant.
Details on how to apply will be included in the proposal acceptance
email. All funds will be disbursed by check or cash at the
conference.
Seidel wrote her first romance novel not long after
finishing her Ph.D. in English literature at Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to her many acclaimed novels, including the RITA-award
winning contemporary romance Again (1995), she
is the author of “Judge Me By the Joy I Bring,” the final essay in the 1992 anthology, Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women.
A supporter of IASPR since its inception, Seidel
has funded travel grants for graduate students, independent scholars,
and untenured faculty presenting on popular romance at the Popular
Culture Association national conference and at IASPR’s
international gatherings. We are grateful for her generous and
continuing support.
the more Romance [...] authors participants recognized, the fewer morally dubious [...] scenarios they believed permissible [...]. In fact, once Moral Purity concerns - a measure of the importance people place on purity or sanctity when making moral decisions - was controlled for, Romance was the only variable besides Science Fiction that was clearly related to Moral judgment.(22)
The authors do note that "the correlational nature of this study limits any causal inference: it could [...] be the case that when it comes to choosing novels, people pick stories that will enforce their existing beliefs and desires" (23) but perhaps
reading romance novels, in which clearly identified heroes and heroines achieve an "optimistic, emotionally satisfying" ending [...], may encourage readers to view the world in black and white terms. That romance novels tend to end with a "happily ever after" may be particularly relevant given prior research showing a relationship between fiction exposure and Just World beliefs. (24)
The paper by Jessica E. Black, Stephanie C. Capps and Jennifer L. Barnes can be found here. Please note, though that this is a pre-print version and the final version of "Fiction, Genre Exposure, and Moral Reality" may differ a little from the version in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
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Sydney E. Thorp, an Honours Philosophy student at Hamline University, has written their honours project in the form of a romance novella, complete with a central love story and happy ending. The protagonists do briefly discuss popular romance fiction, too: Eva, our philosopher heroine, comments
"You want another example of how women and romantic love are easily dismissed?" Ava asked, frustrated. "Two words: romance novels. Even though the romance novel industry is an enormous, billion-dollar-a-year industry, almost entirely dominated by women - female authors, editors, publishers, et cetera - no one takes romance novels seriously as a genre of fiction. And why? Most likely, because it is connected with women." (15)
The story
follows two people as they try
to determine what romantic love is, and why it was a neglected or
minimized philosophical object for centuries. As the characters
converse, they develop the concept of philosophy described above,
discuss the place of women, passion, and reason in philosophy, and
determine – to the extent they are able – that romantic love is
something people do, rather than a feeling or state of being, and is
based on an unjustifiable attraction to another person and Aristotle's
concept offriendship, specifically philia.
The idea of romantic love being a practice, rather than an emotion or
a state of being, seems to be uncommon in philosophical work on the
topic. It seems just as rare, especially historically, to think of
romantic love as being between equals, who mutually care for each other
and commit equally to the relationship.
You can read the abstract and download the whole of Entangled: Romantic Love and Philosophyas a pdf from here.
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Still on the topic of love, Olivia Waite argues that, in romance novels, love isn't "a prize you earn for doing everything correctly" but, rather, "It would be far more accurate to say not that romance novel characters
are looking to get love, but that love is looking to get them" and that, in terms of the plot and what the characters are hoping to achieve, "The real villain of any romance novel is love itself."
What's food for love? Food! At least according to Jennifer Crusie, who argues that: 1) "The kind of food makes a difference because it characterizes the people eating it."
2) "food doesn’t just build romances, it builds all relationships."
3) "The person who controls the table, controls the interaction."
4) "food also says a lot about place."
----
In the context of "place," another reminder that the next IASPR conference is all about place:
Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture
depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic
fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy / girl / beloved next
door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical
and virtual settings.
and
We’ve pushed the due date for IASPR conference proposals back by two weeks, to September 15, 2017. The conference will be in beautiful Sydney, Australia, just a 15 minute walk from the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge;
it runs from June 27-29, 2018. The full CFP is
here. Please feel free to repost and distribute it!
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Conseula Francis Award for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and / or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. The winning essay this year is “The Stable Muslim Love Triangle – Triangular Desire in Black Muslim Romance Fiction," by Layla Abdullah-Poulos of SUNY Empire State College: a groundbreaking study of "the amalgamation of Islamic, Black American, and American notions of love, courtship, and sexual dialogue" in this emerging textual corpus.
As the winning essay, "The Stable Muslim Love Triangle" will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Abdullah-Poulos will also join the the panel of judges for next year's Francis Award.
The Francis Award is in honor of Conseula Francis, whose work on popular romance fiction focused on African American authors and representations of Black love. Essays submitted to the competition may focus on work in any medium (e.g., fiction, film, TV, music, comics, or advice literature) or on topics related to real-world courtship, dating, relationships, and love; priority for the Francis Award will be given to manuscripts that address the diversity of, and diversities within, popular romance and romantic love culture: e.g., diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexuality, disability, or age.
Associate provost and professor of English and African American Studies at the College of Charleston, Francis was the author of The Critical Reception of James Baldwin: 1963-2010 (2014) and the editor of Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). In 2010, she was awarded a research grant by the Romance Writers of America for “Uncommon Pleasures: Textual Pleasure and Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary African American Romance and Erotica,” a project focused on the work of Beverly Jenkins and Zane. An essay drawn from this research, “Flipping the Script: Romancing Zane’s Urban Erotica,” was published shortly before her death in Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? Francis wrote about Zane for the NEH-funded Popular Romance Project, as well as about romantic representations of Barack and Michelle Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign.
The annual deadline for submissions for the Francis Award is December 1, and the winner will be announced in April or May of the following year. All submissions should be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Please put “Francis Award” in your subject line. All submissions must be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; in keeping with JPRS publication guidelines we will consider essays of 5000 to ~10,000 words in length. Please remove your name or the name of any co-authors from the submitted manuscript; in your cover-letter email, please provide your contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a 150-200 word abstract of the submission.
The judges for the Francis Award will be a mix of established and emerging scholars in the field of Popular Romance Studies, chosen by IASPR; each winner will be invited to join the judging team for the following year.
The Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
Think Globally, Love Locally?
Sydney, Australia
27-29 June, 2018
Space,
place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture
depicts particular locations and environments as
“romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy /
girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a
complex mix of physical and virtual settings. The romance industry may
be globalized, but popular romance culture is
always situated: produced and circulated in distinctive localities and
spaces, online and offline. Love plays out in real-world contexts of
migration and dislocation; love figures in representations of
assimilation and cultural resistance; in different times
and places, radically disparate political movements—revolutionary,
reactionary, and everything in between—have all deployed the rhetoric
and imagery of love.
For
its seventh international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the
International Association for the Study of Popular
Romance calls for papers on romantic love and popular culture, now and
in the past, from anywhere in the world. We are particularly interested,
this year, on papers that address the relationship between love and
locality in popular culture: not just in fictional
modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction,
etc.), but also in didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals,
journalism), in advertising, and in both digital and material culture
(wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.).
The
conference will be held at Macquarie University’s city campus, 123 Pit
Street, Sydney. The venue is in the heart of
Sydney’s CBD shopping and dining precinct, a 15-minute walk away from
the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and historic Rocks area.
Topics of interest might include:
Geographies of love and sexuality
Love’s Settings: e.g., the imagined Outback of Rural Romances; the Scottish Highlands; romantic cities; small-town and
island romances; the communal space of “Romancelandia”
Romantic Chronotopes: times and places when love is imagined to be “truer” or “deeper” than the here-and-now (e.g., Regency
or Victorian England; medieval Provence; Tang Dynasty China; the Joseon settings of Korean TV-drama, etc.)
Honeymoon travel (past and present) and romantic tourism, including fan pilgrimages for romantic texts and films, destination
weddings, and the like
Locality and LGBTQIA romance culture
Courtship in public and semi-private spaces: e.g., paying visits, dating, office romance, romance and car culture
Love’s Architectures: Hotels, Fantasy Suites, Clubs and Restaurants, Domestic Spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, Red Rooms of
Pain, etc.)
Local, National, and Transnational Book Industries
Local Romance Writer Groups, Reader Groups, or Media Fan Groups / Events
Romance and the (Local) Library or Bookshop
Local Love on Television (e.g.,
Farmer Wants a Wife) and online (Tinder, etc.)
“Escapist” reading and the places / practices of romance consumption
Place and Race in Popular Romance
The “Phone-World” and other Virtual Spaces for Love
Off the Map: Emerging and Under-Studied Settings and Romance Cultures
·Material locations and imaginary spaces for love, and the combination of the two in Edward Soja's concept of "thirdspace"
·Migration and love: migration
for love, love hampered by distance, love in migrant and refugee communities
·Non-geographic
love (e.g., love experienced entirely online) and the intersections of
technology with long-distance love, now and in the past
·Lieux de memoire in the context of romantic love (as opposed to national identity)
·Love and nationalism, love and regionalism, love and (local) political struggle
All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including discussions of pedagogy.
Submit 250-300w proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to
conferences@iaspr.org by 1 September 2017. All proposals will be peer reviewed.
