New Publications: The Meaning of Life and Work; Sexuality; Race; Language; the Environment and More

I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:

In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:

For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)

And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.

AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone. 

And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:

Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance Novels. Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025). “Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023).” REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]

 Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels. PhD, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]

Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre. Honours Dissertation, Seattle Pacific University.

 Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Hodson, Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism". New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters: 103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "The Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988." Contemporary Women's Writing 19. [Abstract available here and excerpts here.]

 

Kilian, G. Charles (2025). Gender, Genre, and Pleasure: Eroticism and Its Limits in French and Francophone Literature (1950–2010). PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [As noted in the RSDB, this may be of interest to romance scholars because of its attempts to define the differences between erotic literature, pornography and romance.]

Lancaster, Guy (2025). " ‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child." Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 56.1:25–36. [Details here.]

 

Nygren, Sandra (2025). Perfect imperfections: – en intersektionell fat studies-analys av tjocka flickprotagonister i young adult-romance. Masters, Linnéuniversitetet.  

 

Penttinen, Sara (2025). Mind-Reading the Romance Novel: Effects of Single Perspective and Dual Perspective in Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners and Julie Olivia’s The Fiction Between Us. Master's in English Studies, University of Helsinki.

 

Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025). "Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors." Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]

 

 Sutton, Denise H. (2025). “Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]

 Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026

 

Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies.  [More details here.]

Call for Papers: Northeast Popular Culture Association virtual conference

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION, Virtual, October 9 to October 11, 2025
AREA: ROMANCE/POPULAR ROMANCE FICTION

Deadline: Tuesday, July 15th by 5pm EST

Contact email: Wendy Wagner wwagner@jwu.edu

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2025 annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.

We are seeking paper proposals on the topic of Romance/Popular Romance Fiction for its annual conference.

We welcome a wide variety of papers related to romance and popular romance fiction. Possible approaches can include cultural studies, narrative analysis, issues of representation , production and dissemination of romance fiction, audience studies, the public uses of romance fiction/s, and more.

We are also interested in forming panels around some of the following topics:

· Romance and fanfiction – fandom as a training ground for developing romance writers

· The Romance industry and social media marketing

· Romance re-imagining itself – How does contemporary romance fiction take on and transform its own genre? How does it re-make the “pirate romance,” the “arranged marriage” trope, fairy tales and mythological re-tellings?

· Romance fiction in languages other than English

· Romance and disabilty

More information here.

New Publication: "Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction"

 

Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction

Edited by Josefine Smith and Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman

This edited volume explores multiple issues in romance fiction, based on survey data from real romance readers. An updated version of Janice Radway’s influential survey looking at romance readers in the early 1980s, this time scholars explore romance readers’ habits and attitudes in the twenty-first century. Each contributor in this volume uses the same survey data to make unique statements about gender, intersectionality, popular fiction, and popular culture. By using a common data set but approaching it from different perspectives, this unique volume is able to apply multiple methodologies to the same subject.

This was due in April from Rowman & Littlefield but I didn't see any information about it on Google Books so I assumed it had been delayed. It probably wasn't, because although there's still not a lot of information out about it, it has indeed been published.

The full abstract can be found on the publisher's website (Rowman & Littlefield has been taken over by Bloomsbury, so although it was published by R&L, the details are on the Bloomsbury site here).

Luckily Jonathan Allan has now received a copy and was able to send me images of the contents pages, so I'll include the titles of the articles below:

----

Jacqueline Burgess and Gaja Kolodziej - "Re-Reading Romance: Exploring Practitioner, Reader, and Industry Perceptions of the Genre"

Ayşegül Rigato - "From Private to Public: #Bookstagram as a Safe Space for Romance Readers"

Josefine Smith - "Romance Readers' Perceptions of New Adult Fiction"

Natalie Duvall and Matt Duvall - "Which Women Want What?: The Shifting Demographics and Perspectives of Romance Readers"

Jessica Caravaggio - "Social Media, Critical Analysis, and Feminist Action: Popular YA's Role in Disseminating Theory Online"

Joann Stout - "Beyond the Bodice Ripper: Why Erotic Romance is Feminist Literature" 93-110

Lise Shapiro Sanders - "Reading Historical Romance/Reading Romance Historically"

Anna Michelson - "Romance Reading as a Social Activity"

Andrea Barra - "Escaping the Negativity of "Escapism": Rethinking Romance Reader Notions of Why They Read"

Jessica M. W. Kratzer - "Love, Romance, Sex, and Happily Ever After: A Feminist Exploration of Women who Read Romance Novels"

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman - "Coming of Age and Coming Out: The Intersection of New Adult and Queer Romance"

Trinidad Linares - "Getting Love Out of the Margins: Race, Disability, Sexuality, and the Idea of a Happy After for Marginalized People"

Christina M. Babu - "Retellings and Re-readings - Romance, Representation, and Reimaginations in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (2022)"

Louise Schulmann-Darsy - "Mr. Darcy as the Perfect Book Boyfriend, or the Impact of BookTok on Male Characters in Romance Books"

Sara Partin and Josefine Smith - "Reading Romance and Erotic Literacy"

Arkansas Romance

I recently received an email from Guy Lancaster who works for the Central Arkansas Library System:

I edit the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Among other things, I've been trying to ensure that we develop entries on any professionally published work of fiction set in Arkansas, including romance novels. You can find many of them just doing a search for the word "romance" on our site: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/?s=romance

I thought I'd share that with readers of the blog, in case some of you have a particular liking for/research interest in romances set in Arkansas.

CFP: Romantasy

 CFP Edited Collection: Feral: Romantasy and Its Readers

Editors: Kacy Tillman, University of Tampa, kacytillman@gmail.com
Sarah Walden, Baylor University, Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu

Proposals Due: June 30, 2025

 

This will be a book-length, peer-reviewed volume, and we plan to market it as a trade publication with the University of Iowa Press. We are committed to diverse representations of texts and fan experiences, especially given that the genre is often criticized (rightly so) for centering white, cishet women. This collection will include chapters on queer romantasy, romantasy and disability, romantasy and book bans, romantasy and race, and more. This is a highly interdisciplinary collection, so we encourage a variety of approaches.

We are currently looking for chapters that explore any of the following topics:
● Representations of race and ethnicity in romantasy
● Romantasy reception and BIPOC booktok creators 
● Adult readers of YA romantasy
● Romantasy and colonialism

 

Submission Guidelines: Please send the following to BOTH kacytillman@gmail.com and
Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu.
● Contact Information (name, email, phone, and preferred method of contact)
● Working title
● 200-word abstract
● Short professional bio
● Note on whether any of this research has been previously published

New Publications: Readers and Relationships

Here's a list of the latest publications on romance which I've come across:

Cassady, Zoe A., Laura Crisp and Corrine M. Wickens, 2025. “Struggling in the Heartland: Romance Novels and Rural Adolescent Identity of Failure.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Online First. [Abstract here.] 

Dahy, Faten Abdelaziz (2025). "Love-Bombing, Gaslighting, and Hoovering: A Psychological Study of Selected Romance Novels by Colleen Hoover." Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 6.3:56-75.

Rizkyane Machmuri, Alya, Yuyun Nurulaen & Pepen Priyawan (2025). "Romance Formula in Zoulfa Katouh’s Novel As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow." ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8.1: 224–234. 

Rowe, Simone 2025. “The Map to Black Love: The Information Behaviours of Black Readers Seeking Romance Books With Black Character Representation”. The IJournal: Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 10 (2). Toronto, Canada: 107–120.

Swanson, Alexandra (2025). "“Bluebeard’s Castle”: Reconsidering Romance and Revenge in Netflix’s You". #MeToo TV: Essays on Streaming Rape Culture. Ed. Ralph Beliveau and Lisa Funnell. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 101-110. [Excerpt here. I had some concerns about the framing of this, which I discuss in the Romance Scholarship Database.]

Tristanty, Anggie Ayu Isra and Johny Alfian Khusyairi (2025). "Mass-produced romance: BookTok society and the homogenisation of literary culture." Jurnal Studi Komunikasi 9.1:249-260. [Details and some concerns about the works cited here.]

CFP: Conference Session Sponsored by the University of Tasmania

ROMANCING ACADEMIA: PLACING ROMANCE

Friday 22 August 2025

Wrest Point, Tasmania

 

The concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies, driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia 2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry. In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are together often described by readers and writers using the spatial metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place (2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations – place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and scholarly engagement.

Proposed papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as ‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not limited to): 

• “Romancelandia” and its different characteristics 
• Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
• Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
• Food as a metaphor for place 
• Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
• Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
• Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
• Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
• Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
• The place of romance in public libraries 

We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 16th May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.

 

More details here: https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2025-romance-writers-of-australia-conference/romancing-academia

CFP: Essay Collection on Laura Kinsale

From Alexandra Vasti:

Not One Word But True: Romance Authors and Scholars on Laura Kinsale

USA Today bestselling romance novelist and literature professor Alexandra Vasti is seeking abstract submissions for an edited collection of essays on New York Times bestselling romance novelist Laura Kinsale.

Over her thirty-year career as a RITA-award-winning writer of historical romance, Laura Kinsale produced twelve expansive and genre-defining novels. From the Medieval Hearts series with its extraordinary Middle English dialogue to the textual representation of receptive and expressive aphasia in Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s novels pushed at the edges of the romance genre both thematically and formally, challenging and upending its most familiar tropes for her devoted audience of millions of readers.

In this collection of essays, bestselling romance authors including Olivia Waite, Alexandra Vasti, and Freya Marske will reflect on Kinsale’s impact on the genre as a whole, as well as their own personal relationships with Kinsale’s work. From essays on metaphor, symbolism, and sentence construction to larger considerations of Kinsale’s immense global and chronological range, these authors will explore Kinsale’s work and contextualize her novels within the scope of romance currently being written and published.

In addition, scholars of romance are invited to consider Kinsale’s work from a critical lens. Her novels frequently include Orientalist stereotypes and villainous representations of queer men, even as she repeatedly challenges, undermines, and flips those tropes. Her complex portrayals of trauma and disability precede and precipitate conversations about those topics in the genre. And her own critical engagement with gender in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) is frequently reiterated and challenged by authors and readers today.

These collected essays will invite renewed consideration of one of the defining authors of the genre, aimed at new and long-time romance readers, creative writing students, and teachers and scholars of romance. We anticipate that the collection will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.

Interested essayists are invited to contribute essays on single or multiple books within Kinsale’s oeuvre. Topics might include:

• Kinsale’s work in the context of 21st-century romance novels

• War and trauma

• Orientalism

• Gender and gender performance

• Sexuality, particularly representations of queer characters

• Sex, kink, and power

• Disability

• Language use, especially her use of vernaculars, accents, and Middle English

• Genre

At this stage, interested scholars are invited to submit a title, abstract, and brief bio for consideration. Once the book proposal is accepted, final dates for the essay submission (4000-8000 words) will be set. 

Please send materials to Alexandra Vasti at alex@alexandravasti.com by May 31, 2025.

New Publications: Teaching, Bathsheba, Lesbian Pirates, Stay-At-Home French Canadians, Beverly Jenkins and some Socialism

Abrahamsson, Elin (2025) "Teaching Feminist Cultural Studies Using Popular Romance" Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Deosun, Ceri (2025). "The Bible in Inspirational Fiction: The Case of Bathsheba." The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry. Ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Oxon, Abingdon: Routledge. 348-363. [Excerpts available from Google Books and Routledge's page about the volume can be found here.]

Garber, Linda (2025). “The Present in Our Past: Reading Lesbian Historical Fiction.” Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe. Ed. Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 59-75. [Abstract here.]

Luneau, Marie-Pier and Jean-Philippe Warren (2025). “Exoticism Without Cosmopolitanism: The Quebec Romance Novel of the 1940s and 1950s.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29.1: 154-166. [Abstract]

 

Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2025). “The Religious Work of Beverly Jenkins’s Black Historical Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Nielson, Annika (2025) "The Summer of YA Love: Young Adult Romance, Tiktok, and the Classroom," The Utah English Journal 53, Article 14.

 

Timlin, Carrie (2024). "“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.2:197-217.

Can you help a Romance Scholar with their Research?

Romance Genre Browsing and Engagement in the Digital Age

Birmingham University PhD student Katie Deane has produced a questionnaire as part of a study which "looks at how romance novels circulate amongst their readership in the digital age, from recommendation cultures online to digital shelving, search, and discovery". She's looking for romance readers to fill in this questionnaire. Can you help?

 https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/bham/romance-reader-survey

She promises it's "pretty short". And if you could also share it with any other romance readers you know, particularly ones aged 18-24 who've not responded in large numbers yet, that would be really appreciated.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Decolonising Affective Relationships in Contemporary Romantic Narratives

Special Issue Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Editors:
Irene Pérez-Fernandez (University of Oviedo)
and Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez (University of the Balearic Islands)

Popular romance has traditionally been decried as low-quality and escapist genre by conservative canon gatekeepers and feminist scholars alike, scornfully repudiated on account of its allegedly endless recreation of old-fashioned romantic fantasies and harmful gender stereotypes, and generally understood as stubbornly impervious to politics and, as a result, unworthy of academic attention. Despite the complex evolution experienced by the genre in the last few decades and its indisputable popularity, romance fiction continues to be perceived by many as unsuitable for classroom discussion and postcolonial critical thinking. Our aim in this special issue is to reflect on how romance in its multiple print and media forms–, can be a suitable vehicle for postcolonial/decolonial critique.

The deadline is the 30th of March. More details here.

IASPR Conference 2025

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.

More details from IASPR here.