Black Romance Podcast

 Julie Moody-Freeman, of DePaul University, has started a podcast:

The Black Romance Podcast features conversations with Black writers, editors, and scholars of historical and contemporary popular romance fiction. Guests talk about a range of experiences: their difficulties trying to publish love stories with Black characters; their favorite books; writing and teaching about black romance fiction; traditional vs self-publishing; publishing queer romance fiction; the impetus for writing books that focus on inclusion and racial uplift themes; and their recently released books. These intergenerational voices of writers featured in this podcast are beginning to build a much needed archive on the production and publication of Black Romance.

You can find out more at @blk_romance, Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

New to the Romance Database

 

New articles have been published by the Journal of Popular Romance Studies:

• Asexual Romance in an Allosexual World: How Ace-Spectrum Characters (and Authors) Create Space for Romantic Love
  Ellen Carter
• The Kitchen and Beyond: The Romantic Chronotope in Pakistani Popular Fiction
  Javaria Farooqui

and among the other items recently added to the database are:

Béja, Alice, 2019. "La new romance et ses nuances. Marché littéraire, sexualité imaginaire et condition féminine." Revue du Crieur 12.1: 106-121. [Excerpt]

Hijazo-Gascón, Alberto, 2009. "Cross-Cultural Differences in Conceptualization and their Application in L2 Instruction." Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning. Ed. Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya and María de la O Hernández López. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 42-59. [This may not immediately appear to be about romance but it looks at metaphors in novels by Corín Tellado. Excerpt.]

Magenya, Sheena Gimase, 2020. “Reading between the lines: A review of Dark Juices and Afrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries Vol 1.” Agenda. Online first. [Abstract and excerpts]

Saint-Jacques, Denis et Marie-José des Rivières, 2011. «Le féminisme problématique d’un roman d’amour, Anne Mérival.» Recherches féministes 24.1: 61–76.

In particular, I've been adding a lot of French-language items, some of which were in the old Romance Wiki database and some which were new to me. I'm also working my way through the chapters in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance, adding details for each and also carefully checking each chapter's bibliography for items that are not already in the Romance Scholarship Database.

New Book: Jodi McAlister's "The Consummate Virgin"

Jodi McAlister's PhD thesis has now been published as a book by Palgrave. The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures 

explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.

It has chapters on historical romance and category romance which will be of particular interest to scholars of popular romance fiction.

Vivian Stephens and the RWA

Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out. https://t.co/SI9xxoVbbQ

— mimi swartz (@mimiswartz) August 19, 2020

There's a fascinating article in the Texas Monthly, by Mimi Swartz, about Vivian Stephens, a ground-breaking romance editor.

Candlelight Ecstasies are obviously, genuinely, radically different than other category romances of the period. So seeing her talk about why that was, and the fact that it was a deliberate choice, is fascinating. Even now, 40 years later, it's impossible to miss the shift.

— Elisabeth Lane (@elisabethjlane) August 19, 2020

Stephens was also one of the founders of the RWA and the article discusses the differing visions for the RWA which led to a parting of the ways. A few years ago, the RWA leadership apparently again failed to listen to her; if they had, they might have avoided the 2020 racism implosion. And now the RWA is naming their main award after her.

A horrifying detail which emerged as a result of the publication of this article is that the account given by staff to Courtney Milan of a conversation they had with Stephens is diametrically opposed to what Stephens herself told Swartz. The conversation took place

in March 2016. She is at lunch at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Houston’s Museum District with three white women: two members of the RWA’s executive staff and the then president of the organization, Diane Kelly. Everyone has their hands in their laps, and some kind of ice cream and pastry dessert sits in front of each of them. Despite their smiles, the party looks a little stressed.

At that time, the racism roiling within the organization had not yet burst into public view. Stephens, who had mostly lived the life of a retiree since moving back to town, usually met with the RWA executive staff once a year or so, and the meetings were typically friendly, full of small talk. But during this lunch, Stephens told the women that she could see trouble was coming, and she had brought along the RWA magazine that featured photos of all the RITA winners, none of whom were Black, as a visual aid.

“Well, what do they want?” Stephens recalled one of the women asking.

“The same as you,” was her retort.

Courtney Milan has now tweeted:

My aside: I was on the Board when this conversation happened, and was told about it afterwards. This is absolutely not what was conveyed to me by the white participants in the conversation.

I was told that Vivian Stephens did not think I should be speaking up about racism. [...] I know they often heard...different things than what was said, which then had to be resaid along with assurances that no, I didn’t think they were racist, but... Just to be clear: they conveyed to me that Vivian Stephens thought I was white. They said Vivian Stephens specifically referenced this blogpost and thought I should not be speaking.

Allison Kelley is the person who told me this. Carol Ritter was also at that meeting. Those are the two unnamed staff not mentioned, but I’m thinking we could already guess that.

And Alyssa Cole's response sums up my response too:

I'm so sorry. I thought I couldn't be shocked anymore and maybe I shouldn't be, but this is extra evil.

— Alyssa!!! Cole (@AlyssaColeLit) August 19, 2020

New: The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction

The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction is, sadly, very expensive in the current format (hardback), but it's out now, and it's very exciting for the field of popular romance studies that it exists because its purpose is to provide

an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and still-emerging field.

[BREAKING NEWS: It's a lot cheaper as an ebook (i.e. approximately US $37.57/£28.79 depending where you go). Buy links here.]

It's edited by Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo and there's a chapter in it that I co-wrote with Eric.

I'm told a somewhat cheaper (but probably still not cheap) ebook version should become available next year.

Here's the table of contents:

Introduction [can be downloaded as part of the "preview pdf" available from the publisher]

Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo

PART I: NATIONAL TRADITIONS

1   History of English Romance Novels, 1621–1975

jay Dixon

2   The Evolution of the American Romance Novel

Pamela Regis

3   Australian Romance Fiction

Lauren O’Mahony

PART II: SUB-GENRES

4   Gothic Romance

Angela Toscano

5   The Historical Romance

Sarah H. Ficke

6   Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

María T. Ramos-García

7   Young Adult Romance

Amanda K. Allen

8   Inspirational Romance

Rebecca Barrett-Fox and Kristen Donnelly

9   Erotic Romance

Jodi McAlister

10   African American Romance

Julie E. Moody-Freeman

11   Explorations of the "Desert Passion Industry"

Amira Jarmakani

PART III: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES

12   Romance in the Media

Jayashree Kamblé

13   Literary Approaches

Eric Murphy Selinger

14   Author Studies and Popular Romance Fiction

Kecia Ali

15   Social Science Reads Romance

Joanna Gregson and Jennifer Lois

16   Publishing the Romance Novel

John Markert

17   Libraries and Popular Romance Fiction

Kristin Ramsdell

PART IV: THEMES

18   Class and Wealth in Popular Romance Fiction [a pre-print version is available here]

Amy Burge

19   Sex and Sexuality

Hannah McCann and Catherine M. Roach

20   Gender and Sexuality

Jonathan A. Allan

21   Love and Romance Novels

Hsu-Ming Teo

22   Romance and/as Religion

Eric Murphy Selinger and Laura Vivanco

23   Race, Ethnicity, and Whiteness

Erin S. Young

24   In Response to Harlequin: Global Legacy, Local Agency

Kathrina Mohd Daud

New Romance Web Archive

From Steve Ammidown (Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist, Browne Popular Culture Library):

Browne Popular Culture Library at BGSU and the University of Michigan Libraries have partnered to create a web archive meant to capture significant sites related to the romance genre. You can find it here: https://archive-it.org/collections/13215

This is still a work in process, and some sites are not listed yet due to some technical issues, but the idea is to capture both full sites and articles and other significant moments within the genre. If you look now, you’ll notice that there are many pages related to this winter’s RWA scandal, for example. We’ve also partnered with several sites to capture everything they’ve posted, including Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the Fated Mates Podcast, All About Romance, WOC In Romance, and more. Our hope is to avoid a situation like what happened with the Romantic Times Book Review site, where only a portion of the important historical content on that site was captured before it disappeared.

Much of the credit for this project goes to Maura Seale at Michigan, who approached me with this idea last year [...] and took responsibility for managing the technical aspects.

I hope this becomes a valuable research resource for years to come. If you have sites that you think would be useful to capture, please feel free to reach out to Maura or myself. It’s worth pointing out that when it comes to capturing entire sites, we are doing it only with the consent of the site owners. There are several sites we approached who have asked us not to capture their content, and we’ll respect those wishes. That said, we’re happy to reach out to others if the research community thinks it’s worthwhile!

---

This makes me so happy. Huge thanks to @mauraseale and her team for all their work. Hopefully this helps us avoid losing important pages and sites in the future. https://t.co/3oBOVsmHMj

— Steve Ammidown (@stegan) July 23, 2020

Here's the announcement to Twitter, which will help with contacting Steve and Maura. I've added a link in the Teach Me Tonight sidebar to this resource.

New Publications: Faith, Love, Hope, Pastoral Care; the Gothic; Houses; Publishing and Diversity in Libraries; Sex, Virginity; PTSD

I'm not sure I've mentioned this before on here (and I'm busy cross-posting this news in a variety of places, so apologies if you see it more than once) but I've been busy working on Faith, Love, Hope and Popular Romance Fiction. It's a book which, as is rather obvious from the title, is about faith, love, hope and popular romance fiction. Since we're in a pandemic, I felt particularly uncertain about what the future might hold and so I decided I'd just publish the book in whole myself, on my website. That may or may not have been a good idea, but my hope is that this way I can get feedback/constructive criticism from other romance readers, romance scholars, and also romance readers. I've had some of that already and updated the book as a result, but I hope there will be more.

Since it's all online, there probably isn't all that much point writing a synopsis here, but it does include:

* a new definition of romance which suggests that romances are a form of pastoral care

* detailed analysis of romances by Alyssa Cole, Piper Huguley, Rose Lerner and Nora Roberts

* analysis of how "devils" and protagonists "in hell" are saved

* use of guides to romance writing and statements by readers and romance authors

Please do head over to https://www.vivanco.me.uk/node/428 and let me know what you think!

In other publication news

Jodi McAlister has "signed with Palgrave, and they're going to publish my scholarly monograph The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures, which is based on that PhD I did a million years ago."

And some other items which are available already (but not all of which are freely accessible):

Anita, Mangatur Rudolf Nababan, Riyadi Santosa, Agus Hari Wibowo, 2020. “Shift on Functions of Sexual Euphemisms in English-Indonesian Translation of Duke of Her Own by Eloisa James.” International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change 13.4: 92-107.

Ayres, Brenda, 2020. "'A Necessary Madness': PTSD in Mary Balogh's Survivors' Club Novels." Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 97-120. [See the RSDB for more details.]

Burg, Jacob, 2020. “Houses of Genre Fiction: The Shared Estrangement of Postwar American Culture.” Brandeis University. PhD thesis. [Excerpt - but not of the relevant chapter, which is about "romance" but includes discussion of books which are not romance. The romances include The Flame and the Flower and Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient. See the RSDB for page numbers.]

Di Leo, Jeffrey, 2020. "The Speed of Publishing." American Book Review 41.4: 2, 26-27. [Excerpt]

Hirst, Holly, 2020. There are two chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic which are about romance and both are by Holly Hirst. The first is on "The Gothic Romance" and the second is "Georgette Heyer." Hirst has also produced a video about Heyer and the gothic which can be viewed for free here. There's an accompanying blog post about Heyer and the gothic here and a bibliography to go with both.

Lawrence, E.E., 2020. "The trouble with diverse books, part I: on the limits of conceptual analysis for political negotiation in Library & Information Science." Journal of Documentation, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2020-0057

Roper, Holly N., 2020. Representing the Romance: Diversity and Inclusion in the Romance Collections of Public Libraries​. M.S. in Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

RWA Research Grant 2020

Before posting this, I checked the statement that IASPR made earlier in the year about changes which needed to take place in the RWA in response to racism within the RWA. It seems to me that the RWA has made most of the changes requested (the "Action Plan" is perhaps still in progress) and I'm therefore happy to publicise the RWA Research Grant.

The RWA's statement on racism can be found here:

As an organization that just went through a massive crisis for many of the same reasons that underscore these protests for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and so many more —injustice, racism, and unfairness—we acknowledge that we have turned aside from confronting difficult truths for far too long. That our authors from marginalized communities, especially our Black authors, have been treated as somehow less deserving of a seat at the table of publishing. We must admit and learn from this shameful past, while standing up for our goal and commitment to make the future better. We stand together in the fight against systemic racism.

Academics wishing to apply can be assured that the RWA is prepared to fund academic work "confronting difficult truths."

The call for applicants for the 2020 RWA Research Grant is here. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2020. The committee is looking for submissions from a wide range of academic disciplines. This could be a great opportunity for any academic from

• anthropology,
• communications,
• cultural studies,
• education,
• English language and literature,
• gender studies,
• library studies,
• linguistics,
• literacy studies,
• psychology,
• rhetoric, and
• sociology.

and, indeed another discipline which has interesting insights to offer into romance, but who hasn't yet worked on it, to join the field of popular romance studies. If that describes you, you've read the details on the RWA and you're still a bit doubtful about whether it's worth applying, it really is worth contacting Dr. Natalie Tindall, chair of the committee, whose email is included on the RWA website.

Details on how to attend the IASPR Conference online 10-17 July 2020!

I'm really pleased to be able to share details of the online 2020 IASPR Conference (10-17 July)


The sign-up page and details of presentations and round-table discussions are accessed from https://iaspr2020showcase.org/

Presenters include (but are not limited to!):

Kecia Ali
Loving in the Doom Years: Nora Roberts’ Chronicles of the One

Amanda Allen
How YA Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Popular Romance

Javaria Farooqui
Reading Anglophone Historical Popular Romances in Pakistan

Maria Isabel González Cruz
Building a Glossary of Hispanicisms in a Corpus English Romances Set in the Canaries

Jayashree Kamblé
Recoloring London: Empire and Ethnicity in Popular Romance

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

On Libraries, Medical Romance, Sex and Consent, RWA

The RWA has announced that the RITAs will be replaced by a new contest, called The Vivian, after Vivian Stephens, one of the founders of the RWA. [Archived version here.] There was some coverage of this in The Guardian. Here's a bit more detail about Vivian Stephens and why she's such an important figure in the history of romance:

A Black editor in a predominantly white industry, Stephens sought to incorporate the voices of women of color into the burgeoning romance industry. In 1980, Dell published the first category romance by a Black author with Black protagonists- Entwined Destinies by Rosalind Welles (the pseudonym of journalist Elsie Washington). Stephens also made sure that Dell’s Candlelight lines included romances by Indigenous, Latina, and Asian authors, creating almost single-handedly the category that trade publications called “Ethnic Romance”. (BGSU University Library)

There's more about her here. Some negative responses to the proposal to rename the RWA's main awards after her can be found here, including a comment from one author who stated that

I dislike people who try to rewrite history. I live in the South-Southwest where every county seat has a memorial to the Confederate soldiers. Taking them down does not change the Civil War. We all know that was a terrible event. I hate when people try to make history politically correct. It wasn't. We can't alter it.

Possibly a comment which says rather more about the RITAs than the author intended. Also, as an academic blog, I have to point out that historians are constantly "rewriting history." For example, here's an article about the history of the rewriting of the history of the US West. Often history needs to be rewritten because the version that's currently known is inaccurate:

Black cowboys and cowgirls have shown up to support Black Lives Matter this week, but their presence also symbolizes something much more. Black cowboys have long been part of American history: Historians estimate that during the 19th century, one in four cowboys was black. Many ranchers depended on these skilled black workers to herd their cattle, and many went on to become famous rodeo stars themselves, such as Bill Pickett, who invented the bulldogging technique. Yet throughout the 20th and 21st century, the narrative shifted. Hollywood films whitewashed the idea of the cowboy, turning it into a stoic caricature. (Vogue)

I only have one new publication to report in this post. However, it's freely available online:

Veros, Vassiliki, 2020. “The selective tradition, the role of romance fiction donations, and public library practices in New South Wales, Australia.” Information Research 25.2

On a more positive note with regards to libraries, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, which has a collection of nurse romances, now also has an online exhibition of some of these texts, Angels and Handmaidens, which is designed in part to demonstrate how romance fiction can be a useful resources for scholars working in a wide range of fields:

This exhibition is a demonstration of how to begin primary source research; it suggests numerous ways that students and scholars might approach popular romance as a resource, and gives examples of the types of questions that can be asked of resources from popular culture while inviting the viewer to generate their own questions about the sources.

The exhibition was created by Katie Stollenwerk, who recently completed a 3 year internship with the UWM Special Collections department.

On the topic of consent, K. J. Charles has written a discussion of/guide to how to write consent in sex scenes which explains how depictions of consent have changed in romance and how to write it so that it's sexy because

these days there’s a lot of people who’d agree that consent is a Good Thing, but they don’t want to hear about it. Consent in romance sex scenes is frequently covered with a single “do you want this?” or variations thereon. (Or even “If you want me to stop, tell me now because I won’t be able to control myself much longer.” That was in a book published two years ago. Wow.)
The argument goes, roughly, that we know we have to tick the consent box, but:

• it’s unsexy to ask permission
• a properly sexy alpha hero can intuit that the virgin hero/ine really wants flagellation followed by anal on their first time
• consent is wishy-washy PC nonsense that gets in the way of the good stuff
• consent is boring because it’s just endless repetition of ‘may I kiss you’/do you like this?’  and people don’t really do that.

As it happens, some recent research by Jennifer L. Piemonte, Staci Gusakova, Marissa Nichols & Terri D. Conley, provides evidence in support of Charles' thesis that consent can be sexy. Here's an excerpt from the abstract of "Is consent sexy? Comparing evaluations of written erotica based on verbal sexual consent":

In Study 1, we compared brief excerpts of erotic fiction in which verbal sexual consent was either present or absent and determined that U.S. adults judged the stories similarly and, if anything, considered the excerpts with verbal consent sexier. In Study 2, we generated erotic stories that followed familiar, heterosexual scripts and compared evaluations of erotica with consent expressed explicitly and verbally to erotica with consent expressed implicitly through no resistance. Participants considered both versions equally as sexy, indicating that public concerns about consent ruining sexual dynamics are potentially unwarranted.

Some new publications: Romance and Italy, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, the USA; happy endings; Christianity; the RWA; Sherry Thomas

It hasn't taken long for the RWA crisis to be turned into a case-study:

Lawrence, Kelsey, 2020. "No Happy Ending: Leadership Falls Apart at the Romance Writers of America." SAGE Business Cases. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529741117 and here's the abstract:

This short case asks students to examine the controversy stemming from allegations of racism within the Romance Writers of America (RWA), one of the largest U.S. writers’ and trade organizations. Students will assess the organization’s response to the allegations, its subsequent change of leadership, and what this indicates about the overall culture within the RWA.

The crisis is also mentioned, albeit briefly, in the article by McAlister et al (see details below): "the implosion of the Romance Writers of America in late 2019 over issues of institutionalised racism demonstrated that the romance industry is still suffering from 'publishing’s diversity deficit'."

I'll take the opportunity, since I've brought up the topic of the RWA, to mention that the new Board of Directors issued an apology to members (archived here) and also to Courtney Milan:

The Board Members wrote:

Dear Courtney,

For our first and most important order of business, we, the members of the Board of Directors of Romance Writers of America, are writing to apologize to you. We acknowledge the improper, unfair, and wrongful handling by RWA of the ethics complaints filed against you. We offer our sincerest apology to you for what transpired. We object vehemently to the way the proceedings were conducted, and we are very sorry for the resulting impact on you.

As a result, in a unanimous vote as a new Board, we have expunged both the complaints and the ensuing proceedings from the record. This should never have happened, and the fact that it happened to you--someone who has worked so hard to champion diversity, inclusion, and equity for our members from marginalized communities--is a travesty.

While we regrettably cannot undo how your case was managed, we will be conducting a thorough review of the current RWA Code of Ethics and surrounding procedures, as well as the RWA Policy manual, to ensure that they best reflect RWA's current priorities and principles, and so that RWA can help avoid situations like this in the future.

We thank you for your years of dedicated service to RWA, and we will work hard to be worthy of that dedication.

And in other publications:

Adamenko, Olga and Olga Klymenko, 2020. "Communicative Behavior via Gender Identity (Based on the English language 'love stories')." Psycholinguistics 27.2. 44-70. https://doi.org/10.31470/2309-1797-2020-27-2-44-70 The abstract is in English but the paper itself is not.

Cassiday, Julie A., 2020. “A World Without Safe Words: Fifty Shades of Russian Grey.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Haruna, Alkasim and Noor Hashima Abd Aziz, 2019. "Towards an Understanding of the Efferent Reading Stance of Hausa Popular Romance Novels." European Academic Research 6.12: 6829-6839.

Johnson, Emily D., 2020. “Exploring His/Her Library: Reading and Books in Russian Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Kamblé, Jayashree, 2020. "When Wuxia Met Romance: The Pleasures and Politics of Transculturalism in Sherry Thomas’s My Beautiful Enemy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Kamitsuka, Margaret D., 2020. “Prolife Christian Romance Novels: A Sign that the Abortion-as-Murder Center Is Not Holding?” Christianity & Literature 69.1: 36-52. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752347

McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad, 2020. "#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family." Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-020-09733-1

Moss, Madi Markle, 2020. "Review: When Was the Last Time You Read a Romance Novel?" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53.1: 189-193. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/dialjmormthou.53.1.0189

Paradis, Kenneth, 2020. “Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction.” Christianity & Literature 69.1: 73-90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752349

Pierini, Francesca, 2020. " “He Looks like He’s Stepped out of a Painting:” The Idealization and Appropriation of Italian Timelessness through the Experience of Romantic Love." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Schell, Heather, 2020. "After “I Do”: Turkish Harlequin Readers Re-Imagine the Happy Ending." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Schell, Heather and Katherine Larsen. “How the Story Ends: Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in the Happy Ending”, Writing From Below 4.2 (2019). https://writingfrombelow.org/happiness/how-the-story-ends-schell-larsen/
 
Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2020. "Cultural Authenticity, the Family, and East Asian American Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Papers that would have been given: BGSU conference

The Bowling Green State University romance conference would have started yesterday. Here's Wednesday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-22/

To help spread awareness of what colleagues are researching, at a time when people can only do this online, I'll post the titles of papers, including a link to the abstracts.

Carry Me Over the Threshold: Using Popular Romance Novels in Women’s and Gender Studies Classes to Teach Disciplinary Threshold Concepts 
Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin Green Bay

Finding a Family: The Genre World of #RomanceClass

Jodi McAlister, Deakin University, Australia
Claire Parnell, University of Melbourne
Andrea Anne Trinidad, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

The Need for Romance Reader Studies

Mary Lynne Nielsen
Keira Soleore

Black Romance as Liberation: Beverly Jenkins' Historical Romance as Black Feminist Praxis and Historical Pedagogy

Nicole M. Jackson, Bowling Green State University

That '90s Kind of Love: Pinnacle Books and the birth of the African American romance novel

Jamee Nicole Pritchard, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

“To Be Able to Love Is Freedom”: African American Historical Romance as Neo-Slave Narrative

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Fan Letters to Betty Cavanna: How Canonical Young Adult Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Romance

Amanda Allen

From Pulp Tragedy to the Romance HEA: The evolution of gay pulp fiction and queer romance at Avon.

Sarah Slocum

Roar and Crash: Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Era

Jessica A. Kahan

Rare Books and Ripped Bodices: Teaching Romance as Book History

Rebecca Baumann, Indiana University - Bloomington

Romance and the Rare Book Trade

Rebecca Romney

Here's Thursday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-23/

Appetizing Fare: a comparison of two eras in the history of Gothic literature

Malia S. Jackson

Georgette Heyer's legacy in historical romance research

Alexandra Sterling

The Problem of "Clean" Romance: Blurring the Boundaries

Lee Tobin McClain, Seton Hill University

Browsing is Hard, And Taxonomies Are Dead Sexxy

Sarah Wendell
Stefanie Hunker, BGSU

Pushing Boundaries in Romance Fiction: How Erotic Romance Became Mainstream

Anna Michelson, Northwestern University

The Cultural Significance of Indie Black Romance

Nicole Falls

Writing the Romance: Resilience and Solidarity in the Digital Economy

Christine Larson, University of Colorado Boulder

Cracked Mirrors: Mental Health Representation in Romance

Melinda Utendorf

Let’s Talk About Sex: Examining Language Choices in Contemporary Romance

Darcey Lovell, University of Rhode Island

Plus Ones: Romantic Heroines as Mathematicians and Scientists

Heather M. Schell, George Washington University

Lesbian Romance Novels and the Representation of Female U.S. Presidency

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University

Reading Alyssa Cole's "Agnes Moor's Wild Knight"

Maura Kenny, CUNY Graduate Center

The Embodied Borders of Gender, Race, and Disability in His Road Home

Trinidad Linares