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Wednesday, December 27, 2017

New to the Wiki: Feminism, Language, Virgin River and Sexuality


If you've got some spare time over the holidays, you might want to take a look at some of these: a lot of them are available online.
English, Jessica, 2017. 
Reading the Romance: Through the Eyes of a Millenial Feminist.” Masters Thesis. Eastern Washington University.
 
González Cruz, María Isabel, 2017. 
"Conciencia Sociolingüística e Hispanismos en un Corpus de Novela Rosa Inglesa." Pragmática Sociocultural/Sociocultural Pragmatics 5.2: 125-149. Abstract in Spanish and English, article in Spanish, pdf available.
 
Johnson, Heather., 2017. 
"Yorkshire English in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax." Schwa: Language and Linguistics 14: 57-70.
 
Malinowska, Anna, 2017. 
'Paternal Structures of the Romance', Romanica Silesiana 12: 40-52. Abstract
 
Russell, Shanon, 2014. 
"Dangerous Young Men: Themes of Female Sexuality and Masculinity in Paranormal Romance Novels for Young Adults." Masters Thesis. University of Ottawa.
 
Sandbakken, Asta Margrethe, 2016. 
"Feeling Men: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Emotion in the Contemporary Romance." MA Thesis, University of Oslo
 Simon, Jenni M., 2018. 
Consuming Agency and Desire in Romance: Stories of Love, Laughter, and Empowerment. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. Excerpt

I'm not the only person who adds entries to the Romance Wiki's Academic Bibliography. Christina Martinez has recently added the following:

Neuhaus, Jessamyn and John Neuhaus. 2015. 
"'Sometimes It Feels More Like a Commune Than a Town': Envisioning Utopian Possibilities in Robyn Carr's Virgin River Romance Novels." Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, 2015, pp. 25-42. Excerpt
Stafford, Jane. 2016. 
"Romance in the Backblocks in New Zealand Popular Fiction, 1930–1950: Mary Scott's Barbara Stories." Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, Lisa (ed. and introd.) Fletcher, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 63-78.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Call for Contributors: New Academic Pop Fiction Blog

Elizabeth Parker of the University of Birmingham (UK) has written that:
A few of us at the University of Birmingham are in the process of setting up a Popular Literature blog. The idea is that each month there will be a different contributor, who will write a couple of entries on all things Pop Lit related! If you're interested in contributing, please do get in touch!
She adds that "We’d definitely be really keen to have some romance scholars contributing… " You can reach her at e.parker@bham.ac.uk

Monday, November 06, 2017

Call for Papers: PopCAANZ 9th Annual International Conference 2 – 4 July 2018


PopCAANZ 9th Annual International Conference

2 – 4 July 2018

Auckland University of Technology, City Campus
Auckland, New Zealand

The Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (Pop CAANZ) is devoted to the scholarly understanding of everyday cultures. It is concerned with the study of the social practices and the cultural meanings that are produced and are circulated through the processes and practices of everyday life, as a product of consumption, an intellectual object of inquiry, and as an integral component of the dynamic forces that shape societies. We invite academics, professionals, cultural practitioners and those with a scholarly interest in popular culture to send a 150 word abstract and 100 word bio to the area chair by 31 March, 2018.

The area chair for Popular Romance is Jodi McAlister: popularomance@popcaanz.com

The call for papers can be found here and the conference page is here.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Call for Papers: Heyer Conference in London


The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries

UCL, London, June 19th 2018

The call for papers was tweeted, with the details embedded in this image. In case that makes the text hard to read, I've transcribed the call for papers below the image.



Proposals for papers and sessions are invited for a one-day conference to be held at UCL on June 19th, 2018.

Plenary: Professor Kathryn Sutherland, Professor of Bibliography & Textual Criticism, Oxford University

This interdisciplinary conference is aimed primarily at exploring Heyer's historical novels, but will also set her work in context with other contemporary female historical fiction writers, such as Norah Lofts, Margaret Irwin, Margaret Campbell Barnes, and Anya Seton, and with contemporary Regency romance.

Papers are invited on any aspect of Heyer's historical works, including:

* Sources and influences
* Critical and popular reception
* Class, gender and sexuality
* Publishing and marketing histories

We hope that the day will be a combination of formal and informal sessions, and be a chance to meet other Heyer readers and discuss the impact of her work.

Please send a suggested title, synopsis (300 words) and biography (150 words) via a Word attachment for 20 minute papers or for longer panel sessions, by January 26th 2018, to Dr Samantha J. Rayner (s.rayner@ucl.ac.uk) and Dr Kim Wilkins (k.wilkins@uq.edu.au), the conference organisers.

Friday, October 27, 2017

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Racism, Gender, Magazines, and Latina Chick Lit

Ali, Kecia. 2017. 
Troubleshooting Post-9/11 America: Religion, Racism, and Stereotypes in Suzanne Brockmann’s Into the Night and Gone Too Far.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 6.
Arimbi, Diah Ariani, 2017. 
"Women in Indonesian Popular Fiction: Romance, Beauty, and Identity Politics in Metropop Novels." Traditions Redirecting Contemporary Indonesian Cultural Productions. Ed. Jan van der Putten, Monika Arnez, Edwin P. Wieringa and Arndt Graf. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. 247-271. Excerpt

Higashi, Sumiko, 2017. 
'Adapting Middlebrow Taste to Sell Stars, Romance, and Consumption', Feminist Media Histories 3.4 (2017): 126-161. [Abstract which mentions that Photoplay magazine, which began in 1911, "published serialized romance fiction that featured daring, unconventional modern heroines."]
 
Kohlman, Marla H. and Samantha N. Simpson, 2017. 
"For the Sake of Hearth and Home: Gender Schematicity in the Romance Novel." Discourses on Gender and Sexual Inequality: The Legacy of Sandra L. Bem. Ed. Marla H. Kohlman and Dana B. Krieg. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2017. 115-128. Abstract

We also have a chick lit bibliography, to which I've recently added:
Hedrick, Tace. 
Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. Details and excerpt

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Call for Papers: “Researching the Romance” April 13-14, 2018



The Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, in association with the Department of Popular Culture, will be hosting “Researching the Romance”, a conference for scholars, authors, and readers of popular romance fiction. Our Guest of Honor will be award-winning author Beverly Jenkins. The conference will take place April 13-14, 2018 at the Jerome Library on the  BGSU campus as well as at the Wood County District Public Library in Bowling Green, Ohio.

From the website of Bowling Green State University:


Introduction:
In 1997, the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University held one of the first academically oriented conferences on the genre of popular romance fiction. Titled “Re-Reading the Romance,” the event included authors and academics from around the country sharing their experiences and love for the genre.  A follow up conference titled “Romance in the new Millennium” was held in 2000, featuring even more thoughtful looks at romance.

In the years since the last conference at BGSU, the romance industry has grown to more than $1 billion per year in sales, and the study of popular romance has grown by leaps and bounds along with it. And we think it’s high time we reconvene in Northwest Ohio to talk about it. So on April 13th & 14th, 2018, the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University will host a conference entitled “Researching the Romance.” 

The conference will be held in two locations over the course of the weekend. Most of the sessions will be held in the Jerome Library on the campus of Bowling Green State University, while Saturday afternoon’s events will be held at the Wood County District Public Library in downtown Bowling Green.


More about the Conference
Our Guest of Honor for the conference will be 2017 RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Beverly Jenkins. Ms. Jenkins has published more than 30 novels, and is well-known for the level of detailed research she puts into each of her books, making her the perfect guest for this conference.

Our Friday lunchtime keynote speaker will be Dr. Kate Brown, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Huntington University in Huntington, Indiana. Dr. Brown is a 2017 recipient of the Romance Writers of America Academic Research Grant for her work, which explores how English common law and constitutionalism give fundamental structure and substance to the historical romance genre.


Dr. Eric Selinger, Professor of English at DePaul University and Executive Editor of the Journal for Popular Romance Studies, will be in conversation with Beverly Jenkins on Friday afternoon. Dr. Selinger has a long history of research in romance fiction, and has frequently taught courses using Ms. Jenkins’ work.


Call for papers:
We are seeking presentations by graduate students and academics interested in the study of popular romance studies, as well as authors writing in the genre. Proposals for individual presentations or entire panels will be considered. The scope of this conference is deliberately broad, with the intention of highlighting the interdisciplinary nature and many different avenues of research possible within popular romance studies. Possible paper topics might include but are not limited to:
  • Textual analysis of individual books
  • In-depth analysis of particular authors’ work
  • Digital humanities approaches to popular romance research
  • The development of certain subgenres within popular romance
  • The rise of romance self-publishing in the age of e-books
  • Authors’ approaches to research on time periods, subgenres, etc
  • The growth in popularity of LGBTQ romance
  • Roadblocks to researching romance, for academics and authors alike
  • Romance novel covers across the decades
  • How authors build an audience in an era of subgenre specialization
  • Reception and fan communities for romance novels, subgenres, or authors
Presentation abstracts (max 250 words) should be submitted by Dec. 1, 2017 via the submission page of this site.
Notification of paper acceptance will be made by Dec 15, 2017.

Please contact Steve Ammidown (sammido@bgsu.edu) or Dr. Kristen Rudisill (rudisik@bgsu.edu) with questions.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Call For Papers: Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing





Submission Deadline: Friday 17th November 2017
Conference Date: Friday 16th March 2018

Location: University of London, Senate House Library

Senate House Library is calling for papers on queer publishing for presentation at a 1 day conference taking place at Senate House in March 2018.

The conference forms part of the events programme for the exhibition ‘Queer Between the Covers’, held at Senate House Library from January to June 2018.

The presence of queer works on twentieth century publishers’ lists tended to represent complex processes of equivocation, marked by streams of open titillation and multi-layered camouflage. Novels of queer love could be presented by mainstream firms as examining
‘social problems,’ released by pulp presses with lurid covers promising erotic excitement, printed in severely limited and expensive editions to avoid censure, or offered to the public by imprints more accustomed to gambling against censorship with works pornographic in their intent and content. This fragmented world, driven by simultaneous repression of and prurient interest in queer lifestyles, means that it is difficult to delineate a broad history of queer publishing.

This conference seeks to engender as broad a discussion as possible of the area in an English language context, and welcomes proposals from researchers in multiple disciplines. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Evading censorship
• Criminal proceedings, and the fear of them
• Histories of specific presses
• Publishing case studies of individual texts or authors
• Cloaking and camouflage – the disguised queer story
• Tensions between published scripts and dramatic performance
• Dealing with ‘underground’ presses
• Pulp novels
• Histories of queer pornography
• Classical influences, ‘Uranians’ and other cliques

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers. To submit a paper, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to shl.whatson@london.ac.uk

Details from here.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Reminder: CfP for Romance at PCA/ACA 2018 closes on 10 October

The CFP for Romance at PCA 2018 in Indianapolis closes this Sunday, 1 October on Tuesday 10 October (the deadline has been extended).

Romance

Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
28-31 March 2017 – Indianapolis, Indiana

In response to Indiana’s role as a national player in debates about the rights and protections due to its LGBTQ residents, this year’s romance area will foreground the topic of popular romance and politics.  The popular romance community—scholars included—prides itself on prioritizing consensus and community over debate, sometimes at the expense of asking hard but necessary questions.  This year, we will open ourselves up to a few edgier panels, where participants are encouraged to push their boundaries and work together to think through some potentially divisive issues.  We are defining “politics” broadly, not solely in terms of governance but also, to borrow the OED’s language, as “the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status.”  Thus, this would span not only party politics in a particular national or regional arena, but also the politics of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and class, among others.
Paper topics on this special theme might include the following:
  • The politics of the popular romance novel
  • M/M romance and the straight female readership
  • African-American and/or multicultural romance and market segregation
  • The academic politics of studying the popular romance
  • Party politics and military romance
  • Politics within the RWA
  • African-American and/or multicultural romance in historical settings
  • Category romance and party politics
If you are sick of politics, or simply want to pursue your own intellectual passion, you are very welcome to do so.  PCA/ACA Romance invites any theoretical or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic related to romance, including the following:  art; literature; philosophy; radio; film; television; comics and graphic novels; videos, webzines and other online storytelling.   We are deeply interested in popular romance both within and outside of mainstream popular culture, now or in the past, anywhere in the world.  Scholars, romance writers, romance readers, and any combination of the three are welcome: you do not need to be an academic to be part of the Romance area.

More details here.

Monday, September 25, 2017

Call for Papers: Conference on Popular Romance in the Digital Age

“Romantic E-Scapes: Popular Romance in the Digital Age”
9-11 July 2018
University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

This conference is organized in the context of the research project “The politics, aesthetics and marketing of literary formulae in popular women’s fiction: History, Exoticism and Romance” (HER) and aims to discuss recent developments in the production, distribution and consumption of popular romance that account for its escalating popularity and its increasing complexity. How comes that the genre’s traditional formulae are thriving in the murky waters of cultural industries in the global marketplace, particularly in light of the new ways and challenges of the Digital Age?

Evidence has it that the scope, production and range of popular romance has continued to diversify throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, reaching an astonishing variety of imprints, categories and subgenre combinations. As an example, Ken Gelder lists the different “brand portfolios” (2004: 46) from the most popular romance publishing houses with series categories that identify subgenres of romance: Modern, Tender, Sensual, Medical, Historical and Blaze (Mills and Boon); or Desire, Sensation, and Intrigue (Silhouette). Beyond these, the list goes on to include other developments or subgenre combinations from the more classical, gothic, thriller or fantasy romance to the more reader oriented Chick Lit, Black (or African-American) romance and the, arguably, more radically modern Lesbian or Gay romance, etc. High in our agenda is then to interrogate the roots and consequences of this diversification of generic traits and target readers within the more general framework of Global Postmillennial cultural developments. Likewise we also aim to examine the political reasons that inspire and transpire from the industry’s imaginative and aggressive commercial and authorial strategies.

Departing from dismissive academic analyses and conventional understandings of popular romance as lowbrow, superficial and escapist, conference participants are asked to unpack the multiple practices and strategies behind the notion of “Romantic Escapes”. A critical or political reengagement with the recreation of these temporal or spatial settings, whether idyllic and exotic locations, specific historical contexts or alternative futuristic scenarios, can help rethink popular romance beyond the mere act of evasive reading or the unreflective consumption of literary romantic experiences, resituating the genre as a useful tool for sociocultural discussion (Radway 1984; Illouz 1997). In this sense, contributions may engage with the multiple ways which the escapist romantic experience can be put to use in more “serious” formats (e.g. Neo-Victorian, historical fiction and historiographic metafiction) and thus with the implications of adapting well-known romantic patterns, formulae or conventions to more culturally “prestigious” genres.

Moving on from these contested acts of escapism, and expanding on Appadurai’s well-known formulation of “scapes” as the multiple “dimensions of global cultural flow” (1996: 33), conference participants are also encouraged to explore the multivalent meanings of these “Romancescapes”, that is “the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (1996: 33) articulated in ever increasing complex and diverse literary formulations of the romantic experience. What are the effects of the global flows of symbolic and cultural capital on the genre? To what extent are romantic narratives determined by specific local conditions and “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988)?

The impact of these glocal forces is evident in the writing, teaching, translation, production, reception and marketing of romance as mediated by the global “E-scapes” (Rayner 2002) of the digital age. The ever-changing demands of the glocal literary marketplace have also altered the conventional roles of writers, readers, and publishers, now blurred in practices such as self-publishing, specific subgenres like fan fiction, or increasingly influential spaces of literary discussion like virtual book clubs. Participants who may want to venture off the beaten tracks of the conventional romance industry are also welcome to explore and chart these new E-scapes of popular romance.

We invite scholarly submissions that address these and other related topics in relation to any of the multiple sub-genres of popular romance as well as the multifarious “romancescapes” in other popular narrative media. Contributors may address these topics from different critical perspectives and disciplines: cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, neo-Victorian studies, comparative literature, and digital humanities, among others.

Please submit a 200-word abstract and a short biographical note for a twenty-minute paper by 28 February 2018. Submissions of thematic panels are also welcome.

Submissions should be sent to Dr. Paloma Fresno-Calleja (University of the Balearic Islands) (paloma.fresno@uib.es)

For more information visit http://her.uib.es/romantic-e-scapes/

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Last reminder re IASPR 2018 conference!

The deadline for proposals is September 15, 2017. The Call for Papers can be found here.

Thanks to a generous donation from American romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel, travel support for junior scholars will be available for “Think Globally, Love Locally,” the Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance.

This Seidel Travel Grant is intended to foster the future of scholarship on romance in genre fiction, film, TV, and other forms of popular culture by helping with travel costs for graduate students, non-tenured faculty (tenure stream or contingent / adjunct), and independent scholars attending the 2018 IASPR conference in Sydney, Australia.

Eligible scholars whose proposals have been accepted for the conference may apply for the Seidel Travel Grant. Details on how to apply will be included in the proposal acceptance email. All funds will be disbursed by check or cash at the conference.

Seidel wrote her first romance novel not long after finishing her Ph.D. in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her many acclaimed novels, including the RITA-award winning contemporary romance Again (1995), she is the author of “Judge Me By the Joy I Bring,” the final essay in the 1992 anthology, Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women.

A supporter of IASPR since its inception, Seidel has funded travel grants for graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty presenting on popular romance at the Popular Culture Association national conference and at IASPR’s international gatherings. We are grateful for her generous and continuing support. 

[The text of this announcement comes from IASPR itself.]

Monday, September 11, 2017

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Feminism, Love, Heyer and Orientalism

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2017. 
"Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel." Journal of Gender Studies. Published online: 28 Aug 2017. Abstract
McAlister, Jodi, and Hsu-Ming Teo, 2017. 
"Love in Australian Romance Novels." The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia. Ed. Hsu-Ming Teo. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.194-222.
McLeod, Dion, 2017. 
"'Try-error-try-it': Love, loss, and the subversion(?) of the heteronormative romance story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 25.1: 73-94. Abstract

And in the section of the Romance Wiki bibliography for items in languages other than English:
Bianchi, Diana, 2017. 
"I gentiluomini si prendono per la gola: cibo e identità nei romanzi di Georgette Heyer". Lingua, Traduzione, Letteratura 1: 75-89. [Diana wrote to me to notify me of the publication of this article and her translation of the title is: "The way to a gentleman's heart is through his stomach: food and identity in Georgette Heyer's novels."]

林芳玫/Lin, Fang-mei. 
"性別化東方主義:女性沙漠羅曼史的重層東方想像/Gendering Orientalism: Women's Desert Romance and the Multiplicity of Oriental Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 174-200. [There is an abstract in English, even though the paper is not.]

Thursday, August 24, 2017

New to the Wiki: Greece, Consent, War, Women, and Zombies


There's a new volume of essays out about Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 which includes two essays I've added to the Romance Scholarship Bibliography. I'm not just drawing attention to the volume because one of the items was written by me: I'd also like to note that there's a third article I've not included in the bibliography because it's about a work which is probably better classified as "romantic fiction" than "romance" but which might nonetheless be of interest. It's Keli Daskala's "Victoria Hislop’s The Island (2005): The Reception and Impact of a Publishing Phenomenon in Greece" which discusses the depiction of leprosy in that novel.
Dyhouse, Carol, 2017. 
Hearthrobs: A History of Women and Desire. Oxford: Oxford UP. Excerpt
Gifford, James, 2017. 
“Mary Stewart’s Greek Novels: Hellenism, Orientalism and the Cultural Politics of Pulp Presentation.” Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913-2013. Ed. Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder and David Holton. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 99-118. Excerpt
 
Malloy, Audrey Miles, 2017. 
"Remnants of the Bodice Ripper: How Consent is Characterized in Heterosexual and Lesbian Erotic Romance Novels." Bard College, Senior Projects Spring 2017, Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects.
Regan, Lisa. 2017. 
"Women and the 'War Machine' in the Desert Romances of E. M. Hull and Rosita Forbes." Women's Writing 24.1 (2017): 109-122. Abstract
Vivanco, Laura, 2017. 
"'A Place We All Dream About': Greece in Mills & Boon Romances." Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913-2013. Ed. Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder and David Holton. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 81-98. Abstract
 
Wilt, Judith, 2014. 
Women Writers and the Hero of Romance. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [See in particular the chapter on "Exotic Romance: The Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik."]
I've also added a new item to the Rom-Com bibliography (because it seems to mostly focus on romantic films/movies):
Romancing the Zombie. 
Romancing the Zombie: Essays on the Undead as Significant "Other". Ed. Ashley Szanter and Jessica K. Richards. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017. Excerpt

Thursday, August 03, 2017

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Australian Romance, Nora Roberts, M/M


There's a high proportion of theses/dissertations in this round-up of new additions to the Romance Wiki Bibliography but I'll start with one which I haven't actually added to it, because it isn't exactly about romance, though it does mention romance a few times: "Breaking the Cycle of Silence: The Significance of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction," a PhD thesis by Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek), which can be downloaded here.

Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher and Kim Wilkins, 2016. 
"Women, Akubras and Ereaders: Romance Fiction and Australian Publishing." The Return of Print?: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. Emmett Stinson and Aaron Mannion. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing. 67-87. [I was very pleased to be cited in this article but unfortunately I think the information actually came from a post I wrote about Australian romance rather than, as stated, from my For Love or Money. I just thought I should mention that in case someone followed the link and then consulted FLoM to find more details.] 
 
Goris, An, 2011. 
"From Romance to Roberts and Back Again: genre, authorship and the construction of textual identity in contemporary popular romance novels." PhD thesis, University of Leuven. Abstract and Index, Pdf [Note that the pdf starts rather abruptly, without a title page or index, but those can be found on the page with the abstract.]

Shumway, David R., 1999. 
“Romance in the Romance: Love and Marriage in Turn-of-the-Century Best Sellers.” Journal of Narrative Theory 29.1: 110-134. Excerpt
Whalen, Kacey, 2017. 
"A Consumption of Gay Men: Navigating the Shifting Boundaries of M/M Romantic Readership", MA thesis from DePaul University. [with a focus on the works of K. J. Charles.]

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

CFP: Popular Romance and Men’s / Masculinity Studies

From Eric Selinger:
Brandon University professor Jonathan A. Allan (Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory) is looking for proposals on men / masculinities in popular romance fiction for the 2018 American Men’s Studies Association conference, which will be held March 22-25 in Minneapolis, MN. The deadline in the CFP is October 15, 2017.
Jonathan was one of the guest editors of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies special issue on Queer/ing Popular Romance, and he is currently at work on a book called Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance (Routledge).
There’s a lot of work to be done on this topic, not least because the romance archive includes masculinities that range from the hyper-hegemonic to the quietly or radically disruptive, and the Call for Papers makes it clear that the conference is open to an equally wide range of topics. Their bullet point list includes:
  • Queering masculinities, sexualities, bodies
  • Transgender studies and men’s studies
  • Men and/or masculinities in BDSM and leather cultures
  • Masculinities and sexualities (i.e. heterosexual, gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc.)
  • Effeminophobia in/and theories of masculinity
  • Fantasies and desires in/through bodies and masculinities
  • The material, phenomenological, and real body
  • Pharmaceutical and medical interventions on the body
  • Masculinities without men, men without masculinities
  • Men, bodies, and digital technologies
  • Aging, youth, and sexualities across the life-span

If you’re interested in pursuing this, please get in touch with Jonathan, or with me (Eric Selinger, IASPR president) before the October 15 deadline.
The intersection of popular romance studies and men’s / masculinity studies is a very promising development in our field. There is work, wild work, to be done!

Sunday, July 09, 2017

News + New Items: Thai Romance, Keepers, Disability and more


I'm always very happy to see scholars moving into the field of romance studies, so I'm glad to be able to mention that Johanna Hoorenman "is currently working on a cultural history of Native American themed popular romance novels, tracing the roots of the subgenre to early American women's captivity narratives and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans" (http://muse.jhu.edu/article/662582).

Ria Cheyne's written a post for Public Books about "Disability and the Romance Novel."

Kecia Ali's been at Smart Bitches Trashy Books to talk about her Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in JD Robb’s Novels.

Mary Lynne Nielsen writes at Dear Author that "the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance."

Christian Peukert and Imke Reimers have found that "romance novels are more likely to be self-published than other genres [...]. The difference becomes particularly evident after 2010, as self-publishing became a successful “mainstream” distribution channel" and "After 2008 (the year after the introduction of the Kindle), there is a small increase in advances for romance novels, compared to a slight drop in advances for other genres. More pronounced, there is a sharp increase in deal sizes for romance novels after 2010 (the introduction of the iPad), whereas the deal sizes for all other categories remain almost constant." They write that:
The fact that more deals were made with future stars among the romance genre throughout the time period of our study suggests that publishers have been able to predict the future success of romance novels better than the success of non-romance books. After 2010 – concurrent with the large rise in self-publishing among romance bestsellers – the ability to predict bestsellers among romance novels increased further, with an increase in the share of future bestsellers among romance deals from about 2% to 5%.

New to the Romance Wiki academic bibliography are:

Markert, John, 2017. 
“God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First.
Christian publishers have long produced romance novels, but the production of these slim books of love have not been a significant part of their overall output. This started to change in the 1980s in response to the increased sensuality found in secular romance novels. The Christian romance has undergone even more of a resurgence at the outset of the new millennium for the same reason: secular romances have notched up the sensuality of their romances today and Christian houses have responded to their constituents who tire of the sexual slant of these secular novels. Indeed, the strength of the Christian market has not gone unnoticed by mainstream houses and numerous secular houses, notably Harlequin, are today producing Christian-themed romances. The secular Christian message is somewhat attenuated, however, which helps explain the continued popularity of those romances produced by Christian publishers. (Abstract)
Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2017. 
"Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions." The Asian Conference on Literature 2017: Official Conference Proceedings. [pdf available free in full online]
This paper is a thematically chronological supplement to the work in
Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2015. 
"Femininity and masculinity in three selected twentieth-century Thai romance fictions." Ph.D thesis, Cardiff University. Abstract Pdf
Veros, Vassiliki, 2017. 
"Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves." Proceedings from the Document Academy 4.1, Article 4. [pdf available free in full online]

Saturday, July 08, 2017

The Canary Islands in London (July 2017)


The Canary Islands group of romance scholars will be at EUPop2017 (The 6th international conference of the European Popular Culture Association at the University of the Arts London) on 27 July to present a panel:

"Sociolinguistic awareness in a corpus of popular romances set in the Canaries" - María Isabel González Cruz

"Sights and Insights into Spaces of Romantic Desire: Representations of Landscape and Place in contemporary romance Novels set in the Canary Islands" - Mª del Pilar González de la Rosa

"The Exotic ‘Other’ in Jane Arbor’s Golden Apple Island" - María del Mar Pérez Gil

"Cultural symbols, myth and identity in four 20th century English popular romance fiction novels set in the island of Tenerife" - María Jesús Vera Cazorla

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Food for Thought: Romance Readers More Moral, a Philosophical Romance and more


According to some new research on popular fiction
the more Romance [...] authors participants recognized, the fewer morally dubious [...] scenarios they believed permissible [...]. In fact, once Moral Purity concerns - a measure of the importance people place on purity or sanctity when making moral decisions - was controlled for, Romance was the only variable besides Science Fiction that was clearly related to Moral judgment.(22)
The authors do note that "the correlational nature of this study limits any causal inference: it could [...] be the case that when it comes to choosing novels, people pick stories that will enforce their existing beliefs and desires" (23) but perhaps
reading romance novels, in which clearly identified heroes and heroines achieve an "optimistic, emotionally satisfying" ending [...], may encourage readers to view the world in black and white terms. That romance novels tend to end with a "happily ever after" may be particularly relevant given prior research showing a relationship between fiction exposure and Just World beliefs. (24)
The paper by Jessica E. Black, Stephanie C. Capps and Jennifer L. Barnes can be found here. Please note, though that this is a pre-print version and the final version of "Fiction, Genre Exposure, and Moral Reality" may differ a little from the version in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

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Sydney E. Thorp, an Honours Philosophy student at Hamline University, has written their honours project in the form of a romance novella, complete with a central love story and happy ending. The protagonists do briefly discuss popular romance fiction, too: Eva, our philosopher heroine, comments
"You want another example of how women and romantic love are easily dismissed?" Ava asked, frustrated. "Two words: romance novels. Even though the romance novel industry is an enormous, billion-dollar-a-year industry, almost entirely dominated by women - female authors, editors, publishers, et cetera - no one takes romance novels seriously as a genre of fiction. And why? Most likely, because it is connected with women." (15)
 The story
follows two people as they try to determine what romantic love is, and why it was a neglected or minimized philosophical object for centuries. As the characters converse, they develop the concept of philosophy described above, discuss the place of women, passion, and reason in philosophy, and determine – to the extent they are able – that romantic love is something people do, rather than a feeling or state of being, and is based on an unjustifiable attraction to another person and Aristotle's concept of friendship, specifically philia.

The idea of romantic love being a practice, rather than an emotion or a state of being, seems to be uncommon in philosophical work on the topic. It seems just as rare, especially historically, to think of romantic love as being between equals, who mutually care for each other and commit equally to the relationship.
You can read the abstract and download the whole of Entangled: Romantic Love and Philosophy as a pdf from here.

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Still on the topic of love, Olivia Waite argues that, in romance novels, love isn't "a prize you earn for doing everything correctly" but, rather, "It would be far more accurate to say not that romance novel characters are looking to get love, but that love is looking to get them" and that, in terms of the plot and what the characters are hoping to achieve, "The real villain of any romance novel is love itself."

[Photo by Wolfgang Moroder and taken from Wikimedia Commons. It is not in the public domain.]


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What's food for love? Food! At least according to Jennifer Crusie, who argues that:

1) "The kind of food makes a difference because it characterizes the people eating it."

2) "food doesn’t just build romances, it builds all relationships."

3) "The person who controls the table, controls the interaction."

4) "food also says a lot about place."
 
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In the context of "place," another reminder that the next IASPR conference is all about place:
Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy / girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical and virtual settings.
and
We’ve pushed the due date for IASPR conference proposals back by two weeks, to September 15, 2017. The conference will be in beautiful Sydney, Australia, just a 15 minute walk from the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge; it runs from June 27-29, 2018. The full CFP is here. Please feel free to repost and distribute it!
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Still on academic matters Amy Burge has written about the status of the "independent scholar" and I've been thinking about some gaps in the history of popular romance.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Romance News Roundup: PhD opportunity, conference report, disability project, diversity at risk, new publications

There's a PhD opportunity at the University of Tasmania:
Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
This scholarship provides $26,682pa (2017 rate) living allowance for 3 years, with a possible 6 month extension.
Popular fiction is the most significant growth area in trade publishing in the twenty-first century. This project is premised on the view that popular or genre fiction is a sector of the publishing industry, a social and cultural formation, and a body of texts. It will offer new insights into contemporary literary culture through systematic investigation of the contemporary significance of one or more popular genres (crime, thrillers, romance, or fantasy) in the twenty-first century. By employing a mixed methodology combining discourse and textual analysis, quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, and/or creative writing, Popular Fiction in the 21st Century aims to contribute to the increasingly urgent demand for conceptual and methodological frameworks for studying genre fiction.
More details here.

If you don't follow the Pink Heart Society blog, you might want to take a look at Amy Burge's report on the 2017 PCA/ACA conference. Ria Cheyne's there too, introducing her Disability and Romance Project, which recently gained funding from the RWA.

Unfortunately there's bad news as well as good in the romance world and
Romance Writers of America is saddened by the news that Harlequin will be ending publication of five of their series lines in 2018.
According to an announcement RWA received, the following lines will close: Harlequin Western (June 2018), Harlequin Superromance (June 2018), Love Inspired Historical (June 2018), Harlequin Nocturne (December 2018), and Kimani Romance (December 2018).
More details here. As pointed out by Kay Taylor Rea,
this news is a huge blow to the romance community for a very big reason: Harlequin is closing Kimani Romance.

Why is this a big deal? The vast majority of Harlequin titles penned by black women are published as Kimani titles. The Kimani Romance line is described as stories featuring ‘sophisticated, soulful and sensual African-American and multicultural heroes and heroines who develop fulfilling relationships as they lead lives full of drama, glamour and passion.’ These titles cover a number of subgenres, so hopefully Harlequin will make a concerted effort to integrate existing series and current authors into other lines. 

I’ll be keeping an eye out for official word from Harlequin and will certainly be watching how the Kimani authors are treated. This could be a huge setback for diversity in romance.
More details here.

And, finally, the latest publications to be added to the Romance Wiki:
Gardner, Jeanne. 2011. 
"'True-To-Life': Romance Comics and Teen-Age Desire, 1947-1954." Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 118-128. 
Kamble, Jayashree, 2017. 
"From Barbarized to Disneyfied: Viewing 1990s New York City Through Eve Dallas, J.D. Robb’s Futuristic Homicide Detective." Forum for Interamerican Research 10.1 (May 2017): 72-86.[Available free and in full online.]
 
Zhou, Yanyan, Bryant Paul and Ryland Sherman, 2017. 
"Still a Hetero-Gendered World: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes and Romantic Ideals in Chinese Boy Love Stories." Sex Roles. Abstract

Thursday, May 04, 2017

And the Winner Is... (First Annual Francis Award)

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Conseula Francis Award for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and / or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. The winning essay this year is “The Stable Muslim Love Triangle – Triangular Desire in Black Muslim Romance Fiction," by Layla Abdullah-Poulos of SUNY Empire State College: a groundbreaking study of "the amalgamation of Islamic, Black American, and American notions of love, courtship, and sexual dialogue" in this emerging textual corpus. 
As the winning essay, "The Stable Muslim Love Triangle" will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Abdullah-Poulos will also join the the panel of judges for next year's Francis Award.
The Francis Award is in honor of Conseula Francis, whose work on popular romance fiction focused on African American authors and representations of Black love. Essays submitted to the competition may focus on work in any medium (e.g., fiction, film, TV, music, comics, or advice literature) or on topics related to real-world courtship, dating, relationships, and love; priority for the Francis Award will be given to manuscripts that address the diversity of, and diversities within, popular romance and romantic love culture: e.g., diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexuality, disability, or age.
Associate provost and professor of English and African American Studies at the College of Charleston, Francis was the author of The Critical Reception of James Baldwin: 1963-2010 (2014) and the editor of Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). In 2010, she was awarded a research grant by the Romance Writers of America for “Uncommon Pleasures: Textual Pleasure and Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary African American Romance and Erotica,” a project focused on the work of Beverly Jenkins and Zane. An essay drawn from this research, “Flipping the Script: Romancing Zane’s Urban Erotica,” was published shortly before her death in Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?  Francis wrote about Zane for the NEH-funded Popular Romance Project, as well as about romantic representations of Barack and Michelle Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign.
The annual deadline for submissions for the Francis Award is December 1, and the winner will be announced in April or May of the following year.  All submissions should be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Please put “Francis Award” in your subject line.  All submissions must be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; in keeping with JPRS publication guidelines we will consider essays of 5000 to ~10,000 words in length.  Please remove your name or the name of any co-authors from the submitted manuscript; in your cover-letter email, please provide your contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a 150-200 word abstract of the submission.
The judges for the Francis Award will be a mix of established and emerging scholars in the field of Popular Romance Studies, chosen by IASPR; each winner will be invited to join the judging team for the following year. 

Thursday, April 27, 2017

CFP: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century - Sheffield, 8-9 September 2017

From the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network (UK)

Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.“ (Zadie Smith)

Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth was published in the January of 2000 and marked the beginning of a new millennium of women’s writing. Considering that this and other texts released around the turn of the century are soon to be the same age as current undergraduates, it seems timely to move on from well-worn discussions of literature produced in the 1970s onwards and focus on women’s writing in the twenty first century.
The contemporary, as a liminal temporal space, marks the transition between past and future and as such is not only notoriously hard to frame but its fluid and ephemeral nature continues to present a challenge in literary studies and beyond. Contemporary literature, in many ways simultaneously ‘with the time’ and then quickly outdated, presents a curious and exciting paradox to think through questions of literary form, the literary market place, the role of authors as public intellectuals and contemporary readers. The need to focus on the present and contemporary state of women’s literature seems particularly poignant in a post-Brexit and Trump era in which laws and ideas surrounding the future state of gender, race, and class politics are ever more obscure and uncertain.
Join us on the 8th and 9th September 2017 as we seek to position the most recent work (post 2000) of established authors alongside the field’s newer voices in order to facilitate a conversation about the present state – and possible futures – of women’s writing.
Possible conference themes:
  • the resurgence of women’s confessional writing
  • the recent rise in popularity of erotic and romantic fiction
  • the emergence of genres such as autofiction and autotheory in women’s writing
  • writing at the intersection of creative and critical/writing across genres
  • writers as public intellectuals and agents of change
  • new directions in writing by canonised authors
Please send abstracts of 250 words and a short bionote to conference@pgcwwn.org until 30th June, 2017.


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Details from here.

Monday, April 17, 2017

CFP: Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance Studies (2018 conference; September 1 deadline)


http://iaspr.org/wp-content/themes/heavingbosom2/img/iaspr.jpg
The Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
 
Think Globally, Love Locally?
 
Sydney, Australia
27-29 June, 2018
 
Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy / girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical and virtual settings. The romance industry may be globalized, but popular romance culture is always situated: produced and circulated in distinctive localities and spaces, online and offline. Love plays out in real-world contexts of migration and dislocation; love figures in representations of assimilation and cultural resistance; in different times and places, radically disparate political movements—revolutionary, reactionary, and everything in between—have all deployed the rhetoric and imagery of love.

For its seventh international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance calls for papers on romantic love and popular culture, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world. We are particularly interested, this year, on papers that address the relationship between love and locality in popular culture:  not just in fictional modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction, etc.), but also in didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals, journalism), in advertising, and in both digital and material culture (wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.). 

The conference will be held at Macquarie University’s city campus, 123 Pit Street, Sydney. The venue is in the heart of Sydney’s CBD shopping and dining precinct, a 15-minute walk away from the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and historic Rocks area.

Topics of interest might include:

  • Geographies of love and sexuality
  • Love’s Settings: e.g., the imagined Outback of Rural Romances; the Scottish Highlands; romantic cities; small-town and island romances; the communal space of “Romancelandia”
  • Romantic Chronotopes: times and places when love is imagined to be “truer” or “deeper” than the here-and-now (e.g., Regency or Victorian England; medieval Provence; Tang Dynasty China; the Joseon settings of Korean TV-drama, etc.)
  • Honeymoon travel (past and present) and romantic tourism, including fan pilgrimages for romantic texts and films, destination weddings, and the like
  • Locality and LGBTQIA romance culture
  • Courtship in public and semi-private spaces: e.g., paying visits, dating, office romance, romance and car culture
  • Love’s Architectures: Hotels, Fantasy Suites, Clubs and Restaurants, Domestic Spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, Red Rooms of Pain, etc.)
  • Local, National, and Transnational Book Industries
  • Local Romance Writer Groups, Reader Groups, or Media Fan Groups / Events
  • Romance and the (Local) Library or Bookshop
  • Local Love on Television (e.g., Farmer Wants a Wife) and online (Tinder, etc.)
  • “Escapist” reading and the places / practices of romance consumption
  • Place and Race in Popular Romance
  • The “Phone-World” and other Virtual Spaces for Love
  • Off the Map: Emerging and Under-Studied Settings and Romance Cultures
·         Material locations and imaginary spaces for love, and the combination of the two in Edward Soja's concept of "thirdspace"
·         Migration and love: migration for love, love hampered by distance, love in migrant and refugee communities
·         Non-geographic love (e.g., love experienced entirely online) and the intersections of technology with long-distance love, now and in the past
·         Lieux de memoire in the context of romantic love (as opposed to national identity)
·         Love and nationalism, love and regionalism, love and (local) political struggle
 
All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including discussions of pedagogy.

Submit 250-300w proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to conferences@iaspr.org by 1 September 2017.  All proposals will be peer reviewed.

Friday, April 14, 2017

New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Eric Selinger writes:

Now that we've switched to a rolling publication format in JPRS, new pieces will appear both individually and in thematic or "special issue" groups. Today, we begin rolling out Volume 6 of the journal with a new Special Issue on Critical Love Studies, edited by Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke. The table of contents is below, and you can find the whole issue here: http://jprstudies.org/issues/volume-6. 

Enjoy! And spread the word!

E

Romance Event in Evanston, Illinois, on 29 April 2017

There's a notice in Evanston Now that there's going to be a film and Q&A session:
Love Between the Covers: Film Screening and Discussion will be held Saturday, April 29, from 2 to 4:30 p.m., Community Meeting Room, Main Library.

Every year romance lit outsells mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy combined. Yet until Emmy-Award winning filmmaker Laurie Kahn turned her camera on the genre, no filmmaker had ever taken an honest look at the amazing global community that romance writers and readers have built.

So why is romance the best-selling genre in publsihing? Do romance novels exploit women or empower them? Following the film three local romance writers, Amy Jo Cousins, Kate Meader, and Julie Ann Walker, will be on hand for a panel discussion moderated by romance scholar, Professor Eric Selinger, of DePaul University. Come for the film, but stay for the Q&A and the chance to ask all your burning questions about contemporary romance novels.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

New Disability and Romance Project

Ria Cheyne is
excited to announce the launch of the Disability and Romance Project!  Please check out the project website at www.disrom.com or follow on Twitter @DisRomProject.

As some of you know, I've been researching the representation of disability in romance for a while now; this new project will gather data from romance readers, writers and other industry professionals with the aim of better understanding how readers respond to depictions of disability in romance, what motivates authors to write disabled characters, and if there are any barriers to publishing romance novels featuring disabled characters.  

I'm delighted to have received funding from the RWA Academic Research Grant for the second phase of the project, which focuses on writers.  The first phase focuses on readers, and our reader survey is now available at:


Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Free Romance Conference, Open to the Public: Williamstown USA, 22 April 2017


Reading for Pleasure: Romance Fiction in the International Marketplace 

Saturday, April 22 at 8:00am to 4:15pm

Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall, Bernhard Music Center 54 Chapin Hall Dr, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA

Free and open to the public.


8:00 - 10:00 am:  Panel 1:  Theories of Pleasure (Brooks Rogers Auditorium on the Williams campus)
Chair:  Leyla Rouhi, Williams College
  • Laura Frost, Stanford University:  “Stories of O:  The Language of Orgasm in Women’s Romance”
  • Julie Cassiday, Williams College:  “A World Without Safe-Words:  Fifty Shades of Russian Grey”
  • Eric Selinger, DePaul University:  “Xenophile’s Paradox:  Reading for Pleasure Across the Great Divides”

10:15 am - 12:15 pm:  Panel 2:  New Subjects and Audiences (Brooks Rogers Auditorium)
Chair:  Alison Case, Williams College
  • Sonali Dev, author:  “Genre Structure and Learning to Dance Within its Boundaries”
  • Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University:  “Tigresses, Tang Dynasty, and the Ten Commandments:  The East Asian Romance Novels of Jade Lee, Jeannie Lin, and Camy Tang”
  • Jayashree Kamblé, LaGuardia Community College:  “When Wuxia Met Romance:  The Pleasures and Politics of Multiculturalism in Sherry Thomas’s My Beautiful Enemy
  • Len Barot (Radclyffe), author and publisher:  “Lesbian Romances and the International Market in the Digital Age”

2:15 - 4:15 pm:  Panel 3:  New Media Platforms and the Global Marketplace (Brooks Rogers Auditorium)
Chair:  Greg Mitchell, Williams College
  • Mary Bly (Eloisa James), Fordham University, author:  “Romancing the World:  How and Where American Romance Sells”
  •  Katy Regnery, author:  “From Stay-at-Home Mom to NYT Bestseller in 30 Months:  A First-Hand Perspective on the Digital Revolution in the Romance Publishing Industry”
  • Sarah Wendell, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books:  “The World is So Big; the World is So Small:  The Global Community of Romance”
  • Patience Bloom, Harlequin:  “Harlequin’s International Program:  A World of Romance Readers”
More details here.