Call for Papers: Romance Fiction and American Culture

Romance Fiction and American Culture:

Love as the Practice of Freedom?

Edited by William Gleason and Eric Selinger

Call for Proposals and Essays

Last April, Princeton University hosted a groundbreaking two-day conference on popular romance fiction and American culture. Gathering scholars, authors, editors, and bloggers, this interdisciplinary gathering featured panels on romance and history (both political and literary), romance and religion, romance and sexuality, and romance and race. Each explored the ways that popular romance fiction has reflected, and also helped shape, American culture from the late 18^th century to the present.

Conference organizers William Gleason (Princeton) and Eric Selinger (DePaul University) now invite proposals for a collection of essays that will build on the work of the conference: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? We welcome proposals from academic scholars from any field—American literature, popular culture, religion, women's and gender studies, African American Studies, or any other relevant discipline—as well as from authors, editors, and other members of the romance community who wish to reflect on their practice in light of the volume’s concerns.

We are eager to consider proposals or abstracts on the relationships between popular romance fiction and

• the history of reading in America, from Pamela to the present
• American cultures of sexuality, masculinity, and femininity
• American religious cultures, in Christian and other traditions
• Race, ethnicity, and exogamous desire
• “High” culture: literary fiction, poetry, visual art, etc.
• Other popular genres: mystery / detective fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, non-romance bestsellers, chick-lit
• Other popular media: film, comics, music, gaming
• The culture of sport (football, baseball, NASCAR, etc.)
• American political / military culture, from the early Republic to the present
• American psychological / therapeutic / self-help culture

We also hope for papers on the romance industry in America and the diverse community of romance readers, authors, and reviewers, both as they are and as they are represented in the media:

• Romance sub-genres—Western, Gothic, Regency, Medieval, Paranormal (vampire, were, empath, etc.), Futuristic/time travel, Multi-cultural, Erotic, Gay/lesbian, etc.—and their shifting appeal to readers
• American romance and other traditions: comparative studies, texts in translation, transnational encounters
• Romance publishing: major presses, series and lines, the rise in e-publishing
• Representations of American romance writers, readers, bloggers, book groups, conventions, etc.

Detailed abstract or draft essay and a short CV are due by January 4, 2010. Final essays will be due in June, 2010. We are happy to answer any inquiries. Please feel free to post and / or forward this email to interested colleagues, students, or friends.

Prof. William Gleason, bgleason@princeton.edu

Prof. Eric Selinger, eselinge@depaul.edu

Announcing More Media Attention for Romance Scholars

Laura Vivanco

Thanks to the Smart Bitches, I've just come across an article in USA Today which mentions the Princeton conference and quotes two Teach Me Tonight contributors:

In April, Princeton University [...] hosted a scholarly conference titled "Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture." The event brought together romance writers such as James/Bly and Jennifer Crusie, academics including Pamela Regis and Stephanie Coontz, and Smart Bitch blogger Wendell.

"When I saw the invitation to speak at Princeton, I said, 'Holy crap, we have arrived,' " says Regis, 56, an English professor at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., and author of the seminal text, A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

The conference organizer was DePaul University English professor Eric Selinger, 45. An expert in contemporary American poetry, Selinger's career turned upside down in the late 1990s after he borrowed his wife's copy of Bridget Jones's Diary, the chick-lit classic by Helen Fielding.

"I read it and I loved it," Selinger says. For fun, he started reading the novels on a list compiled by his local library called "If you liked Bridget Jones's Diary, try these ..."

He was amazed. Here he was, an English professor with a Ph.D. from UCLA who had been teaching books for decades and reading even longer. "Yet it never entered my mind to read a romance novel," he says.

Today, in addition to his poetry classes, Selinger teaches courses on the romance genre.

Is it awkward to be a man doing so?

Oh no, Selinger says. His gender makes his life much easier. "Nobody thinks I'm a spinster or trapped in a bad marriage, or I'm betraying feminism," he says. "People don't judge me as much."

The article, by Deirdre Donahue, is available online. It's titled "Scholarly writers empower the romance genre" and focuses on Eloisa James and Julia Quinn. The Smart Bitches have a link to a photo of the article as it appears in a paper copy of USA Today.

The rabbit was originally drawn by John Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland, has been modified by GeeAlice, and came from Wikimedia Commons.

Princeton Romance Conference Opening Roundtable

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Thursday, April 23
Keynote Roundtable: Romance Fiction and American Culture

Tania Modleski, USC
Used Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint as a point from which to analyze the romance genre. Chick lit, in particular, is the latest form of female complaint. Writing for or acting within the “intimate public” means assuming you’re writing for women (in this case) who are just like yourself. The core of complaint rhetoric is a fundamental ambivalence toward love, because it is both the source of most female complaints and also the cure. If it’s truly the cure, though, true social change will never happen. [One has to wonder why. I have a problem with statements like these, because they assume love will continue as it is currently constructed, which is not necessarily true.] Berlant focuses on middle-class, white women’s female complaint, ignoring women of color and privileging the problems and issues of those middle-class white women above those of any other female demographic. What happens, for example, when women of color write romances? Are they then more politically acceptable in their complaining? Male sentimental culture is strong: Clint Eastwood’s movies and male “weepies,” for which the men get awards and rewards, rather than the scorn women get for female-coded sentiment. This privileges male suffering when written, performed, produced by men.

Stephanie Coontz, Evergreen State University
Coontz feels like an outlier at the conference, because she’s never read romances. She can talk, though, about the evolution of marriage, courtship, romance in history. As an historian, she finds literature fascinating because it shows the tensions in people’s lives as they are soothed, resolved, highlighted. She is most interested in the variations between time periods, though, rather in the minute details. Before the eighteenth century, only adulterous relationships could count as love, because marriage was all about the practicalities. During the eighteenth century, though, western society began to imagine the concept of love in marriage and that young people should have the right to choose one’s own partners. The invention of the love match was a very scary thing to defenders of “traditional marriage.” It was seen as both a threat to male power, a threat to female safety, a threat to parental control. It was a far-reaching cultural redefinition in which marriage was no longer overtly a power relationship and men’s and women’s roles and spheres began to separate. Previously, women were seen as hyper-sexual; in 19thC, they were constructed as asexual instead, with their asexuality constructed as natural, rather than a necessity. Women began to turn to other women to talk about feelings, vulnerabilities, and increasingly foreign other gender. In the 20thC, mutual sexual attraction was reintegrated into marriage with the advent of dating, in which sexuality and attractiveness of men became associated with danger (“bad boy”). There was increasing anxiety over men’s intentions and society grappled with very real contradictions, because the dangerous but attractive Other is not a good bet for a stable marriage. Today, there are problems with maintaining sexual tension in a long relationship. Coontz finished her talk by asking how we make confidence in man’s intentions sexy? How to do eroticize equality?

Mary Bly/Eloisa James, Fordham University, speaking today as Eloisa James
Bly/James would like to see a conversation about shame in romance studies. We don’t like to think of shame as attached to reading, writing, or talking about romance, but we need to think about issues of where shame interacts with money in the romance genre. When she was growing up, her reading romance caused a family crisis. For every romance she read, she had to read a classic novel from “acceptable” literature. Her grandmother with no education was undervalued by the family, and that’s mostly where Bly/James got her romance from as a child and teen. Romance were a waste of her time, ruining her brain, like TV. Success hasn’t changed that equation for her. Money doesn’t help; in fact, it exacerbates the problem for her. When she was at Yale, she got “caught” by her friends with romances at the library. Her friends said, “I certainly see why you didn’t want anyone to see that,” and Bly/James felt intense shame. She believes very strongly that it shouldn’t have to be that way. The only way she could give herself permission to write romance was to say it was for money, and even then it became a completely underground career. Her ingrained sense of shame was so huge that she couldn’t reveal herself in the English departments she worked for. Even when she did come out, the shame didn’t go away. Any other popular genre would have been “cool,” but romance was humiliating. Romance scholars simplistically say that the romance genre is an affirmation of female desires, but for women to be reading/writing about sex is a very vexed topic. We have to recognize that and interrogate how shame and feminism and complexity can and do coexist. As scholars, we can’t ignore this. She wants another version of her, in ten years, to be able to use her romance writing as well as her scholarship of whatever kind FOR tenure, rather than having to hide it. She wants to be a part of diminishing the shame.

Jennifer Crusie, Romance Author
Crusie gets up and says, “Hi, I’m Jennifer Crusie, and I have no shame!” Her experience with romance has been very different. She rejects the assumption that people have that writers must agree that they’re writing trash because “everyone knows” that’s what romances are. She argues that romance writers and readers give away too much power because we want to belong. Romance is not merely a US tradition; it’s from all times and all places. It represents the feminizing of a form of fiction—a woman is on the center stage of a romance novel and she struggles and wins, proving that the world is an emotionally just place and that love and women can make a difference. Love is the biggest risk that humans take, but the stories about it are not cool. People turn back to literature of hope. They are not trashy, not stupid, not low class. Crusie ends, “the arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice,” claiming that romance is getting its due.

Questions:
Someone asked about the proliferation of the marriage plot in Reality TV. Bly said that she’d read that the most successful Reality shows are those that are aspirational (American Idol, for example, where you can see yourself achieving same dream). Coontz talked about the proliferation of niche marketing, but argued that there’s far less “Bachelor” on Reality TV nowadays than in the marriage markets in 18thC London.

Someone asked how the subversiveness of feminism works for or against the acceptance of romance (not sure I got that right). Crusie answered that the goal of a writer has to be to tell a good story, rather than insert a message into a book. The book succeeds with a reader because it resonates with a theme inside her, but you can’t predict that theme. Her literary criticism changed radically when she started writing. She’s trying to tell the truth of the people on the page. The true subversive message is that if you struggle, you will win.

Someone asked panelists to talk about Coontz’s final question of how we eroticize equality. Crusie said that the struggle is the story, the power dynamics are what drive it, and the equality comes at the end. Bly said that desire is very stubborn and may not be PC or cool, no matter how much we might like it to be. Coontz said that romances shouldn’t avoid the very real problems that exist in the world and in relationships. In sexuality, fear struggles with confidence. Modleski finished by saying that she thinks it would be most interesting to look at lesbian romances, where the power dynamics are necessarily different.


Overall, I’d heard or read most of the information from this panel before, except what Modleski discussed. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a perfect way to start the conference, because I absolutely think it was. We got a general historical overview (Coontz), theoretical overview (Modleski), and a clashing of some of the major themes in the study of the genre (shame, confidence, happiness, power dynamics, freedom, equality).

One thing that struck me more than anything else, and I didn’t get an opportunity to ask my question, but I was fascinated with the panel’s elision of the masculine, of the hero. Modleski talked about female complaint, Coontz about the construction of love and of the feminine, Bly and Crusie about the motivations of female writers and readers. But no one mentioned the hero of the romance and considering the thematic focus on masculinity in so many romances and romance series, this seemed an interesting omission. I asked Crusie about it after the panel finished and she said very definitely, “The hero’s the MacGuffin” (referring to the film term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock meaning the quest object that has no inherent value in and of itself except in that it catalyzes quest, which is where the real story lies). I wholeheartedly disagree. The hero might be the McGuffin for female-focused romances and romance series (like those of Crusie and James), but it certainly isn’t for me with my absolute hero-focus, and for readers like me who make Suzanne Brockmann, J.R. Ward, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and Stephanie Laurens best-selling authors and m/m romance the fastest growing field in erotic romance.

Princeton Romance Conference

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I'm going to do things backwards and post about the Princeton Conference first, then go back and post about PCA. I want to do Princeton before the 31 pages of Twitter stream for #romcon disappear. I will link to about where the Twitter stream starts for each of the papers. It is listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts (ie: later in paper) at the top of the screen. Go to "newer" posts to progress in the paper.

I'm also going to talk about Friday's papers first, then go back to Thursday evening's panel. I've got to type that one up--I took real, hand-written notes because I didn't have my computer! :)

Romance and Religion: SB Sarah has already blogged this panel in detail.

What fascinated me about this panel was how well it interacted and intersected with my own research into BDSM romance. The catch phrases of BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination, submission) kept coming up again and again through these papers. I'm going to have to hunt down Lynn's book, especially, to see if there's anything I can use.

Lynn S. Neal: What is Inspirational Romance? Twitter starts about here.

Redeeming Love: The love is between man and woman and the couple and God. Conflicts are about God and represent a deeper spiritual malaise. Transformation that seems magical in other books are brought about by the power of God’s love. Neal interviewed 50 female readers of Inspirational romance. It was the readers’ religious choice to read these books. IR represents entertainment and escape and a redemption of popular culture that affirms the values of the readers. IR is an attractive option for both fun and upholding boundaries of faith. It is “wholesome entertainment: pleasing to God because it has scripture and it’s clean. It is a Godly way of self-entertainment, of sacrilizing all of life. They are able to forget about impure books that offer danger rather than safety and instead have an opportunity to combine love of reading and love of God. It’s a “Brain break.” However, the drive may well be escapist, but its fulfillment may not be. Instead, it’s a way through which readers achieve spiritual change. They gained little realizations that helped foster everyday piety. The effectiveness of inspirational romance comes from its utility. How does it establish an emotional connection between the heroine and the reader? It transforms hearing into knowing, doubt into certainty, and a vague sense of God into everyday reality. A Christian romance novel helps readers envision and encounter God’s love and care. Christian romances are a filter for interpreting God and the Bible. The Bible becomes a romance.

Pam Regis: Writing the History of the American Romance Twitter stream starts about here

Regis is trying to put Inspirational romance in larger context of American novel. Inspirational romance is one of the foundations of the American romance writ large. In fact, the form endorses one of the highest forms of freedom: Christian liberty. In romance in general, when characters choose to overcome the barrier, it’s an expression of freedom and the reader feels joy. Regis is writing “The History of the American Romance.” Issues: Have to figure out who is American and who isn’t. Is the form “invented” by M&B and HQN. Is the “form” merely a marketing tool. There are also so many books and such different books—it’s impossible to choose a representative book. There is no bibliography. What was first romance, how far back does it go? Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is first romance novel in America, it was abridged early and often in ways that usually put moralizing at end. Holding an old early-US copy of Pamela feels like holding a HQN romances: that’s how big they are. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s book Vivia: secret of power is faith—definitely inspirational. Regis trying to do books that aren’t covered by everyone else. Highsmith’s The Price of Salt: first popular lesbian romance. Beverly Jenkins: AA romances write very different ending to and are in conversation with previous AA writers or about AA characters (Harriet Jacobs’s Life of a Slave Girl and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Elements of Form: What do barrier and ritual death say about faith in the American romance? Ritual death: mythic moment when union seems least possible between courting protagonists (dark moment). EDEN Southworth’s Vivia: or, the Secret of Power: sentimental romance. Sentimental values: home, affection, connection, family, kinship, sympathy, emotion especially love, Christianity. Part bildungsroman. Barriers (especially between secondary characters) include melodrama, class, disability, separation, deceit. Values of the American romance, both secular and inspirational: Freedom, Individuality, life eternal vs. Death and perversion. Christianity is not on list. Life eternal does mean Christian values in Vivia, but in romance novels it’s the promise of children in epilogues. Inspirational romances are purest form of American romance. Faith—religious, secular, or both—suffuses the American romance (even atheists have faith in love). Freedom and faith are not in conflict in the American romance. Religion is not a tributary of American romance, it’s a source.

R. Marie Griffith (Princeton Religion Dept.) Twitter stream starts about here.

Everything she knows about inspirational romance comes from Lynn Neal. Instead, her research is on evangelical self-help manuals, diet and fitness manuals, and sexuality and marriage guides and she’ll be talking about this today. Evangelical women’s self-help literature: goes back all way into 19thC. Feminism 2nd wave: Friedan’s Feminine Mystique shows us how difficult to it was to be a woman. Friedan’s solution was to stop conforming to the traditional picture of womanhood and to enjoy life. This was seen as women’s rejection of biological roles of wife and mother and destroying all good things about America. Equality between sexes was not a Christian ideal. True liberation is found in submission to husband because of the ideal of a submissive feminine subject and all powerful masculine God. Woman’s relationship with God is shown as father/daughter relationship or marital relationship. God is/as perfect husband, which may compensate for his earthly partner’s imperfections. Can refresh and heal even the most broken marriages. God gets something out of relationship too. Following God’s commands, and flattering him fulfill women’s visions of perfect love relationship. It is a literature of hope and faith and upholds sentimental values. Christian diet and fitness lit: Human body’s fitness affects relationships between god and people—those who are thin and healthy exemplify God’s grace and reward. They caution readers against vanity: not main reason for diets. The main reason to diet has to be keeping bodies under subjection to God’s will. Happiness is found through submission: loving and pleasing God. The image of God as divine lover or husband used as tool to compel Christian women to get thin: “Slim for Him.” “More of Jesus, less of me.” There is an erotic fulfillment through getting thin for god (God as the ultimate HQN billionaire tycoon). One gains one’s happy ending through disciplining the body. There is an eroticization of the power differential. Evangelical sex and marriage guides: Christlike sex and lots of it, selling promises of love and romance. Sexual purity and bodily discipline lead to most sumptuous bodily pleasures and emotional connection.

Beth Patillo (romance author) Twitter stream starts about here.

Beth gets up and says of Griffith's research, "Dude, that's messed up!" Patillo has always kept the romance author part of her life and the minister part of her life separate but her agent said that she could sell a Christian book like that *fingersnap*. Patillo herself has a very low level of interest in personal purity. Heavens to Betsy: 25,000 copies printed in trade paperback, but because Lifeway refused to carry it b/c it was a woman minister, probably about 21,000 were remaindered, because they were trying exclusively for the Christian audience, not the romance audience. Patillo is a non-evangelical Christian writer. The Christian Book Association (CBA) is such a specialized market, but a very vocal market. Miss California: sure, she’s standing for “traditional” marriage, but there’s no comment on Fox about her parading across stage in bikini. Evangelical books: no eroticism. All physicality is about emotions, not eroticism. Christian faith must be depicted as normative but as over and above popular culture. As an author: how do you create journey for two characters who are so squeaky clean to begin with? There is an intense focus on certain pietistic practices designated as “Christian.” Hasn’t had emails about “why didn’t your characters work for justice?” Small Christian book stores are closing at the rate of 100 per year. Only 400 left. What are CBA publishers going to do when they’re dealing with Walmart and not Christian gatekeepers. What’s going to happen to Inspirational fiction when personal piety is not going to be the only definition of Christianity? There might be possibility for happy ending in Inspirational market for romance authors who are not evangelical or pious.

Eric Selinger Twitter stream starts about here. Eric discussed his path to this paper at Romancing the Blog.

Polhemus discusses erotic faith: romance as religion. Eric’s Facebook profile lists “Married” under Religious Preference. In 1990s, literary and cultural commentators announced the death of love. Allan Bloom claimed that one has to have a tin ear to describe one’s greatest love as a “relationship.” Bloom inadvertently points out where erotic faith continued to thrive: “cheap” romantic love. How did we get to be as we are? In Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale plays with long history and conventions of historical romances. Christian, Duke of Jervaulx is a mathematician, so let’s think geometrically: Chiasmus: Maddie is Christian, Christian is mad. Christian is soul trapped in body, Maddie is a body trapped by her soul. Eric is not using Milton just to show off as poetry professor, Kinsale makes the use of Milton as a motif explicit. The novel makes a fetish of Maddie’s long hair, which mirrors the view of Eve in Paradise Lost. Maddie is Eve, Jervaulx is Satan and the means of salvation is mutual human love. How does this novel layer history? Maddie and Jervaulx are 19thC couple with very 20thC conversations about freedom and equality, but those debates range back to 16thC and 17thC views of marriage. Quaker brides explicitly do not say that they will “obey” husbands. “No rule but love between them,” from William Penn. All of these historical contexts have to be kept in mind and this novel is very aware of this. It puts traditions of popular romance fiction right next to 16thC-19thC contexts and conventions.

Mary Bly's question of Pam: Mary’s uncomfortable with faith in romance that’s NOT inspirational being put together with evangelical type of romance. The burst of imagination that makes marriage work in inspirational romance is very very different from the imaginative relationship with another entity. Faith that the relationship will work out is very different from faith that we need another entity to make a relationship work. So conflating the two types of faith is very vexing.

The panel was a great start to the day and an example of all that is good and wonderful about romance scholarship today.

Princeton Posts 2009

I linked to the tweets from the conference in my last post, but there are also a few summaries online now.

At Dear Author there's an overview of the whole conference written by "reader, Karen W, who helps organize the fabulous Celebrate Romance seminar."

Another overview, this time from Joanne Rendell, can be found at The Huffington Post.

Hillary Rettig's piece at Daily Kos is a mixture of an overview and her own ideas about the connections between the romance genre and progressive thinking/activism. This can also be viewed at The Huffington Post.

You'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the summary but Michelle Buonfiglio has a post up about the "Keynote Roundtable, 'Romance Fiction and American Culture'" which included presentations by Tania Modleski, Stephanie Coontz, Mary Bly [“Eloisa James”], and Jennifer Crusie.

Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell summarises the presentations by Lynn S. Neal and Pamela Regis on inspirational romance.

Ann Herendeen, who was part of "Session II: Memory and Desire: Romance, History, and Literary Tradition" has now put up a transcript of her conference presentation.

Michelle Buonfiglio, who was speaking in the "Closing Roundtable: Romance Reads the Academy" has put up a full transcript of her presentation. This presentation turned out to be rather controversial and generated a number of responses after the conference, at sites including Dear Author, All About Romance, and Smart Bitches Trashy Books.

I'll update this post if I find more posts about the conference.

Princeton Tweets

Sarah Frantz and Smart Bitch Sarah are tweeting at the conference and even if you don't read the pages of tweets live, they do give a good feel for what's been going on there.

"Long-awaited cultural recognition"

Laura Vivanco

Via Smart Bitch Sarah and Twitter comes news of another article about the romance genre's seemingly recession-proof success. What's particularly gratifying is the fact that although the article uses the unfortunate "bodice-ripper" label, the focus here is on the fact that the genre is "enjoying long-awaited cultural recognition":

this spring the genre will be the subject of [...] an academic symposium at Princeton University [...]

"Romance fiction is fascinating to look at as a social barometer," says Eric Selinger, co-organizer of the Princeton symposium. "It registers tensions, ideas and debates about gender relations, about love, about marriage, and about the relationship between domestic and public spheres."

Selinger, whose romance scholarship grew out of a personal passion for reading the books — he credits his wife for introducing him to the pastime — extols the genre as "wonderfully unpretentious," with resilient, optimistic characters and "a level of artistry" akin to sonnets in the surprising ways authors play with formula and literary convention.

"It's an art-form that hasn't gotten nearly the attention or respect of other literature," says Selinger, who teaches graduate seminars on romance at DePaul University in Chicago.

The '70s and '80s were hard on the genre. But even leading feminists such as American scholar Tania Modleski, who once dismissed romance as reaffirming patriarchal fantasies, have since come to praise the genre's role in validating female desire.

"There's legitimacy to feminist concern over a certain narrow type of romance narrative," says Canadian scholar Catherine Roach. "But there's a much wider scope to the romance-fiction industry as a whole."

Roach, an Ottawa native and expert on popular romantic fiction, finds it suspect that critics who malign romance novels for their idealistic, happily ever-after tales don't also target equally optimistic messages aimed at men.

"You see James Bond novels and detective stories . . . perpetuating the myth that justice will prevail and bad guys will be punished in the end, which are also false stories," says Roach, an associate professor at the University of Alabama. "But things that are women-dominated tend to accrue less power and prestige in our culture."

The article, by Misty Harris, also includes discussion of the covers of romances and details of a forthcoming exhibition about them:

[Elizabeth] Semmelhack notes heroines of romantic fiction were taking jobs as doctors, travelling alone and creating their own economic advantages long before it was widely accepted to do so off the page. These changes are often visible on the books' covers, which the Toronto-based art historian feels are worthy of close examination.

"The same way Rockwell wasn't considered an artist for many, many decades but has now been added to the art history canon, many of these (romance) artists are very deserving of having their work looked at critically."

Romance Heads to the Ivy League!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the website for the Princeton University conference "Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture" is now live!

Organized by Eric Selinger (DePaul University) and William Gleason (Princeton), the conference will be held on April 23-24, 2009, at Princeton's Betts Auditorium. Featured speakers include:

• Tania Modleski, Dept. of English, USC
• Stephanie Coontz, Dept. of History, Evergreen State University
• Mary Bly [“Eloisa James”], Dept. of English, Fordham University, and romance author
• Jennifer Crusie, romance author and essayist on the genre
• Lynn S. Neal, Dept. of Religion, Wake Forest University
• Pamela Regis, Dept. of English, McDaniel College
• R. Marie Griffith, Dept. of Religion, Princeton University
• Beth Patillo, romance author and ordained minister
• Eric Murphy Selinger, Dept. of English, DePaul University
• Margaret Doody, Dept. of English, University of Notre Dame; Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, Princeton University
• Rita B. Dandridge, Dept. of Languages and Literature, Virginia State University
• Ann Herendeen, romance author
• Sally Goade, independent scholar
• Beverly Jenkins, romance author
• Sarah S. G. Frantz, Dept. of English and Foreign Languages, Fayetteville State University
• Julie E. Moody-Freeman, Dept. of African and Black Diaspora Studies, DePaul University
• Guy Mark Foster, Dept. of English and Africana Studies, Bowdoin College
• Gwendolyn Pough [“Gwyneth Bolton”], Dept. of Women’s Studies, Syracuse University, and romance author
• Emily Haddad, Dept. of English, University of South Dakota
• Esi Sogah, romance editor, Avon Books
• Dana Johnson [“P.J. MacAllister”], Dept. of English, USC, and Alison Umminger [“Grace Grant”], Dept. of English, University of West Georgia, and collaborating romance authors
• Michelle Buonfiglio, blogger and reviewer (Romance: B(u)y the Book)
• Sarah Wendell, blogger and reviewer (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)
• Diane Pershing, romance author, President, Romance Writers of America (2008-2009)
• Monica Jackson, author, paranormal romance; contributor to “ReadersRooms” and other author websites
• Krista Stroever, editor, Harlequin Books

The conference is free and open to the public; please register in advance, as space is limited. For a small fee, conference-goers can enjoy lunch and dinner with participants; again, seating is limited.

Please spread the word, and feel free to link, post, or otherwise disseminate the information. (Carrier pigeon? Semaphore? Hedgehog with a talking box? You name it.)

I hope to see you there!

Breaking News!

Eric, here, everyone, with some breaking news.

Romance fiction--and, just as important, romance scholarship--is heading to Princeton next April!

I've been working on this for a while, and you may have heard tell of it once or twice, but the conference is now funded and ready to run.

The full story here, courtesy of Michelle Buonfiglio, who helped to broker the deal. More details soon--and more about other upcoming romance conferences--here at Teach Me Tonight!