Beverly Jenkins in Conversation with Dr. Carole V. Bell

The Social Transformation Research Collaborative at DePaul University is holding a symposium on Writing, Race, and Memory on 22 October 2024. One of the keynotes is 

11:20am - Keynote | On Romance: A conversation with author Beverly Jenkins (Indigo, Forbidden) and Dr. Carole V. Bell

According to the Instagram post (from which I've taken the graphic), the conversation will be about Black romance. The full programme is here but if you'd just like to sign up for the zoom conversation between Beverly Jenkins and Carole Bell, you can do that here.

JPRS Editors Needed

Eric Selinger has announced that "This spring, after 15 years, I will be stepping down as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies." In this role, and others, he's been central to establishing popular romance studies as a field, so I'd like to express my appreciation for that.

However, this means that JPRS is now "seeking an experienced replacement who is passionate about romance scholarship and can help lead the journal as we grow!"

The full job description for the Executive Editor role can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This is a senior role that requires previous experience of editorial work at an academic journal (or equivalent).
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 2-3 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

They're "also looking to add two Associate Editors to the team to help with regular operations. This is a good position for someone who is interested in getting some experience in the behind-the-scenes operation of an academic journal."

The full job description for Associate Editors can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This role would be well-suited to those without specific editorial experience but who would like to gain an insight into academic editorial roles.
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 1-2 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

New Publications: LGBTQ+ romance, dark romance, rape, publishing, folklore and coral

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are accessible freely.

Greening, Alo (2024). History, Huh: A Post-Modern Study of the Consumption of Queer Romance. Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hernandez, Janeth (2024). Exploring Consent: An Analysis of Consent in Dark Romance and Contemporary Romance Books. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University. 

 

Keran, Molly (2024). The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. 

Kousholt, Moa (2024). A Time, A Place, and A Person: A comparative literary analysis of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and how queer representation can be problematized in a classroom context. Teacher Education Programme for Upper Secondary School, Linnaeus University. 

 

Miclea, Adelina-Cerasela (2024). The Scientification of Love: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Romance Novels. PhD, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara. [Only an index and summary is currently available online.] 

Poirel, Carole (2024). "The long tail business model in publishing: The case of Hachette's romance division in France " Business Model Innovation in Creative and Cultural Industries, Ed. Pierre Roy, Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher. Routledge. 69-88. [Abstract available from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032714462-5 ]

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2024). " 'Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels': Trauma, Recovery and Folklore in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2024) "Love and Loss: Corals and Cultural Sustainability in Caribbean Popular Romance Novels." Arrivals and Departures: The Human Relationship with Changing Biodiversity. Ed. Otto Latva, Heta Lähdesmäki, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio and Harri Uusitalo. De Grutyer. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111215273-006

 

CFPs: IASPR Conference 2025 and Conference of the Popular Culture Association 2025

From the IASPR website, two calls for papers:

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

[More details, including a note for those who "do not have a permanent academic job at a university (eg. PhD students, contingently employed staff, independent scholars), you may be eligible for the Kathleen Seidel Travel Grant" at https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/romantic-regions-call-for-papers-iaspr-conference-2025/ ]

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

[More details at https://www.iaspr.org/frontpage/cfp-romance-area-conference-of-the-popular-culture-association-2025/ ]

Research Degree Opportunity: Falmouth University (UK)

If you're interested in doing a Research MPhil or PhD on romance, you might be interested in this announcement from Falmouth University.

They

are seeking ground-breaking, innovative, and challenging practice-based and critical research proposals on Romance and/or Erotica in their widest sense, including, but not limited to, Bonkbusters and bestsellers, soap operas and mini-series, Gothic and Pulp Romances, melodrama and fantasy, popular magazines and literary Erotica, Hollywood and Bollywood, Romcoms and sitcoms, high and low culture, the sensational and the scandalous, digital depictions and heartwarming tales, the private and the public, Hallmark and Pornhub. 

Proposals on creative writing, literature, history, fashion, illustration, film, TV, popular culture, performance studies, games, and many other genres and mediums will be considered.

To find out more, see https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/research/phd-mphil/doctoral-project-briefs/romance-erotica

New Publications, an Exhibition on Romance, and Coverage in the Media

• Indiana University's Lilly Library has an exhibition (from August 19th 2024 – February 15th 2025) celebrating romance:

In 2021, the Lilly Library became the first major American special collections library to take romance seriously—and we owe the foundation of this visionary collection to author, scholar, and antiquarian bookseller Rebecca Romney, cofounder of the bookselling firm Type Punch Matrix. A romance reader herself as well as an expert on the history of the book, Romney set out to assemble a collection of 100 important works in the history of romance fiction from 1769 to 1999. Because some of the hundred entries in the catalog contain multiple titles (such as the first 1,500 Harlequin Presents romances), these substantial and carefully researched selections became the core of the Lilly’s new romance collection. One of the things we love most about Romney’s selections is her focus on diversity—the history of the romance novel has never been only about straight white men and women.

As we continue to add historical and 21st century titles to the collection, our focus remains on the importance of the romance genre in the history of the book, the ways in which it empowered readers and writers, and also on the potential the genre holds for those who are not taken seriously by people in power to tell their stories of finding a “happily ever after” ending.

• Women's Weekly has an article marking Harlequin Mills & Boon's Australia office's 50th birthday. The article on M&B's history heavily features IASPR's Dr Jodi McAlister. 

• Slate reports on a trend in anti-billionaire romance novels.

New books are questioning the ethics of billionaires, having the heir to a family fortune come out against his father’s unethical business practices, and (in the historical context) having the wealthy risk their place in society by supporting progressive causes like the abolition of slavery. At least one author is trying to put together an antibillionaire romance anthology.

• Time has an article on the evolution of romance covers. This complements their list of the best 50 romances to read, curated by author Casey McQuiston, who also wrote an article for them explaining why "Romance Novels are Literature."
  

Even at its cheekiest or darkest or most satirical, it’s a genre made of sincerity. Opening ourselves earnestly to an emotional experience feels dangerous, and danger makes us nervous, and when we’re nervous, we laugh.But if we don’t laugh, if we don’t turn away, if we stop pretending to be too cool or too intellectual or too ironic to acknowledge our own desire, romance has so much to show us about ourselves. Which is exactly what literature should do.

And here are the new publications I've come across:

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "The Romance Novel." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press. 468–483. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0041

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "Exemplum J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (2005)." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press.  484–489. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0042  

 

Kamrath, Kelly (2024). French Interwar Popular Romance and Ideals of Femininity: A Literary and Historical Study of Magali. Master of Arts, University of Nebraska. 

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "On the Racialization of the Moroccan ‘Other’ in Orientalist Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:103–116.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "The Discursive Formation of Ethnic Subjectivities and Identities in Popular Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.3:106-119.

 

Stewart, Eowyn (2024). A Hero in Tears: How the Female Gaze Elicits Male Emotional Vulnerability in Romance Novels. Honors Thesis, Abilene Christian University.

New Publications: Migration, India, Gender, Consent, Libraries and Translation

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. [This is forthcoming, but a pre-print is available from the page I've linked to.]

Montebello, Sophie (2024). The Representation and Self-Representation of Anglo-Indians in Literature from 1885 to the Present Day. PhD thesis. The Open University.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "Gender as a ‘Discursive Practice’ in Romance Discourse." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:654–665.

 

Speese, Erin K. Johns (2024). "Came for the Smut, Stayed by Consent: Desire and Consent in Sarah J. Maas’s Fictional Worlds." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Velasquez, Diane L. and Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Jennifer (2024). "Romance Genre and Collection Management in Australia and New Zealand Public Libraries." Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association. [Online first. Abstract here, with the article itself available only with a login.]

Vişan, Nadina (2024). "Untranslatability in Regency Romances: Explicitation or Implicitation?" British and American Studies 30:233-241. [Discusses translation from English into Romanian.]

New Publications, including a lot of theses

Barta, Orsolya (2024). Surprise Babies, Bad Mothers & Happily Ever Afters: Pregnancy Narratives and the Concept of Motherhood In Eight Contemporary Romance Novels. Masters thesis, University of Uppsala. [This was not available online when I checked, but the abstract can be found here.]

Båtstrand, Johanne Marie (2024). Bringing the Male to his Knees - Taming the Dangerous Lover: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as the blueprint for love relations in Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses. Masters thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

 

Crawford, Joseph (2024). "From Romantic Gothic to Gothic Romance, With a Little Help from Twilight." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cuthbert Van Der Veer, Kate (2023). Cover story: developing methodologies for the analysis of book titles and book covers. PhD Thesis, School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland. [About half of the corpus here are Australian rural romance novels, so there's a lot of discussion of romance.]

Edmunds, Amy (2024). Revamping The Gaze: How Twilight Hosts the Conditions for Female Spectatorship. Honors Thesis, University of Michigan.

Hashim, Ruzy Suliza and Mohd Muzhafar Idrus (2024). “Unblessed Be Thy Milk: Filial Obedience, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Malay Popular Fiction”. The Asian Family in Literature and Film: Challenges and Contestations-South Asia, Southeast Asia and Asian Diaspora, Volume II. Ed. Bernard Wilson and Sharifah Aishah Osman. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. 139-160. [Abstract here.]

 

Pesonen, Sini (2024). Romance Novels and Possibilities in Life : Analyzing Ethical Aspects in Happiness and Happy Place. Masters thesis, University of Helsinki. 

 

Ramstad, Tessa (2024). Tall, Dark, and Ideal: #Bookboyfriends in six contemporary romance novels. Masters thesis, University of Uppsala.

 

Roach, Catherine M. (2024). "Fantasy and Desire: From my Mother’s Stack of Trashy Novels to an Experiment in Writing at Field’s Edge." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Tavallaie, Marjan (2024). ”It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.”: The representation of domestic violence in popular romance novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover. Masters thesis, Karlstad University.

Wiseman, Sarah Rose (2024). Hearts and Hashtags: How BookTok is Reshaping Romance Literature. Honors Program in English and Media Studies, Guilford College.

New book on historical romance and other new articles

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History, edited by Hsu-Ming Teo and Paloma Fresno-Calleja is out today (13 June) from Routledge. The introduction, "Conflict and Colonialism in 21^st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History" is open access and can be downloaded from here.

The other essays about romance in the collection are:

The Australian Convict Prostitute Romance: Narrating Social and Sexual Justice for “Damned Whores” - Hsu-Ming Teo

Love in Victorian London: Immigrant Histories and Intersecting Diversities in K. J. Charles’s Sins of the Cities - Jayashree Kamblé 

Language, Sexuality and “Necessary” Anachronism in Lorraine Heath’s Neo-Victorian Popular Romance Series Scandalous Gentlemen of St. James - Carmen Pérez Ríu

Suffragette Historical Romances: Re-Purposing Women’s Suffrage in a Postfeminist Context - Mariana Ripoll-Fonollar

The US Civil War and its Aftermath in Historical Quaker Romances Hailing White Heroines as Builders and Healers of the Nation - Carolina Fernández Rodríguez 

Historical Reparation, Emotional Justice: The Navajo Long Walk in Evangeline Parsons Yazzie’s Her Land, Her Love - Silvia Martínez-Falquina

When a Jew Loves a Nazi: Problems with Repurposing the Holocaust for Reparative Romance - Hsu-Ming Teo

Abstracts for all of those can be found here.

---

Other recent publications are:

Austin, Allan W. (2024) "Courting Tragedy: Romance and the Liberal Redemption of Japanese American Mass Incarceration". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13. [Of the two novels discussed, only one is a romance, by Danielle Steel.]

Lukas, Iwan, Muarifuddin, and Rahmawati Azi (2024). "Formula Romance dalam Roman Mes Amis Mes Amours Karya Marc Lévy." LE PARIS: Journal de Langue, Litterature, et Culture 5.1:15-3. [There's an abstract in English but the article itself is written in what I assume is Indonesian.]

 

Rimmer, Abi (2024). "Can I have a side hustle as a doctor?" BMJ 385. [Short article which includes quotes from Fearne Hill. Abstract here.]

Sanders, Lise Shapiro (2024). "Girls Growing Up: Reading ‘Erotic Bloods’ in Interwar Britain". The Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals, edited by Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers and Michelle Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 93-111. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399506663-009

Call for Papers: Bridgerton and Philosophy

 

Call for Abstracts 

Bridgerton and Philosophy 

Edited by Jessica Miller

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium. Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. 

Essays may focus on the Netflix series (including Queen Charlotte), the books, or both.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Submission deadline for abstracts (350-500 words) and CVs: August 30, 2024
2. Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: January 27, 2025

Kindly submit by e-mail to Jessica Miller: Bridgertonandphilosophy@gmail.com

The final papers should be about 3000 words including notes. More details about possible themes/topics can be found here.

New Publications: A History of the RWA; Fat in Contemporary Romance; Romance and Philosophy

In a rather weird coincidence, just days after the Romance Writers of America filed for bankruptcy (which, as explained elsewhere, does not mean it's going to cease to exist, because 

the RWA expects a “swift resolution” to its bankruptcy restructuring, which “will not impact its day-to-day operations” of providing training and other resources to its members. The group “is not going out of business, as some others have made it sound,” (Beckett, The Guardian)

Christine A Larson's Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success is coming out with Princeton University Press. It could be considered a history of the RWA and romance publishing, though Larson emphasises the book's wider appeal to those interested in the topic of

self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers—once disparaged literary outcasts—became digital publishing’s most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia’s historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning.

Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks—increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors’ plunged by 40 percent. The success of romance writers, Larson argues, demonstrates the power of alternative forms of organizing influenced by gendered working patterns. It also shows how networks of relationships can amplify—or mute—certain voices.

I've got excerpts and links in the Romance Scholarship Database entry.

 

Some other new publications are:

 

Cole, Lauryn (2023) Fat and Fabulous: The Power of Contemporary Romance as a Site of Anti-Oppression Work. Bachelor of Arts dissertation, University of Oregon. [This focuses on Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie and Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert.]

 

Lancaster, Guy (2024) "'God loves you nearly as much as I do': Toward a Poetics of Natality in Maureen Bronson's Delta Pearl, a 1989 Harlequin Historical Romance.' Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 55.1:27–39. [Abstract here.]

RWA: New Award, New Bankruptcy Filing

I haven't been following the Romance Writers of America's activities closely since the 2019 implosion (documented in detail on this blog, under the tag RWA, but also summarised more briefly here and here) and a brief return with the 2021 awards fiasco (again, documented on this blog, but also summarised more briefly here). However, today there were a couple of items of news concerning the RWA.

The first involved a change to their main award. An Internet Archive capture of 25 February outlines a

a significant development regarding THE VIVIAN® Award. With the encouragement of the award’s namesake, Vivian Stephens, the RWA Board of Directors has approved a new name for the published author’s contest – the Diamond Heart Award. The Board is excited about the positive impact this change will have as we continue to celebrate the extraordinary richness and variety of our genre. This decision reflects RWA’s dedication to fostering an environment that embraces the diverse voices and experiences within our romance writing family.

While this award undergoes a transformation, Vivian Stephens' name will remain closely tied to our community. Her legacy will continue to be honored through the dedicated RWA industry service award, recognizing her enduring contributions to our shared journey.

That page has been updated since then (and I've saved it the way it looks today here). The judges should have completed their training and "Wednesday, June 5, 2024 - The contest opens at 11 a.m."

However, it seems that today (29 May 2024) the RWA filed for bankruptcy. I haven't seen the details but Courtney Milan posted the following screenshot:

[Subsequently, predominantly due to disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community, membership decreased to approximately 3,000. Due to COVID concerns, the Debtor held its annual conference virtually in 2020 and 2021, and subsequently its membership reduced further. RWA was able to postpone its obligations to the respective Conference Centers these two years by agreeing to add two future years to the applicable Conference Centre Contract to 2028.]

Which, as has been pointed out, rather skates over the details of how and why Courtney Milan was treated very badly by the organisation.

If anyone has more in-depth knowledge of the situation, please do leave a comment!

[Edited to add:

Here's an article about the situation in Bloomberg Law.

Here's a post from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books which explains in rage and detail why the RWA's wording of their excuse is symptomatic of the very reasons the RWA is in this position.

And a similarly righteously angry, and also very detailed, post, at Her Hands My Hands.

The Guardian takes a closer look at the consequences of bankruptcy and pointedly concludes that

As the RWA has struggled, other romance organizations that explicitly prioritize diversity have grown. The Steamy Lit conference, first held in 2023, focuses on creating a welcoming environment for romance readers and writers of color, founder Melissa Saavedra said. An estimated 1,900 people are expected to attend its August conference this year.

The Guardian article states that "Reuters contributed reporting" which presumably refers to this article by Reuters, which begins with some cliches about the genre.]