Conference Cancellations, a new RWA Board in a time of crisis, and Some Secondary Reading

The RWA has a new board (details archived here).

All the upcoming romance conferences have now been postponed (links to details on the conference page).

Below is a list of items I would have added to the Romance Wiki's bibliography of romance scholarship except it's no longer online. If you can read Greek, Portuguese and/or Turkish, you'll be able to understand much more of some of these than I could:


Al Thobaiti, Fatmah, 2019. "Afterlife of the Romance Hero: Readers’ Reproduction of Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8.

Chen, Eva, 2019. ‘“The Hate that Changed”: Cycling Romance and the Aestheticization of Women Cyclists’, Victorian Periodicals Review 52.3, pp. 489-517.

Choyke, Kelly, 2019. "The Power of Popular Romance Culture: Community, Fandom, and Sexual Politics ." PhD Thesis. Ohio University, 2019. [Not available in full until January 2021 but the abstract's here.]

Day, Sara K., 2020. "Reimagining Forever...: The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature." Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Ed. Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 156-170.

Erekli, Arzu, 2006. Medeni ya da müslüman: popüler aşk romanlarında Feyza olmak, Yayınlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Bilkent University, Ankara.

Fletcher, Lisa, Jodi McAlister, Kurt Temple and Kathleen Williams, 2019. “#loveyourshelfie: Mills & Boon books and how to find them.” Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 11.1. https://doi.org/10.7202/1066945ar

Fresno-Calleja, Paloma, 2020. "Chick-Lit Pasifika-Style or How to B(l)end the Formula: Lani Young’s Scarlet Series." Contemporary Women's Writing. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa003

Jones, Amanda. “Madness, Monks and Mutiny: Neo-Victorianism in the Works of Victoria Holt”, Neo-Victorian Studies 12.1 (2019): 1-27.

Kendal, Evie, 2019. “The Use of Free Indirect Discourse in J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood Series.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 38: 20–43. https://doi.org/10.26180/5df1974e1cb20

Kapell, Matthew, and Suzanne Becker, 2005. "Patriarchy, the Christian Romance Novel, and the 'Ecosystem of Sex'." Popular Culture Review 16.1: 147-155. [I may have mentioned this before, but it's now available online]

Lawrence, E. E., 2020. "On the problem of oppressive tastes in the public library", Journal of Documentation, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2020-0002 

Neves, Mariana Brasileiro, 2014. ROMANCES DE BOLSO: A novela romântica da Harlequin Books no mercado editorial brasileiro, Bacharelado, Universidade Católica de Pernambuco.

Nikbakht, H., 2019. Female Agency in the Harlequin Romance Formula: developments within the timeframe of second wave feminism. Bachelor's thesis. Utrecht University.

Taylor, Jessica, 2018. “Flexible Nations: Canadian Romance Writers, American Romance, and the Romance of Canada.” Reading between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel, edited by Gillian Roberts. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press: 199–222.

Villar-Argáiz, Pilar 2018: “Ireland and the Popular Genre of Historical Romance: The Novels of Karen Robards”, ABEI: Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 20.2: 97-109.

And for anyone who can read Greek, a masters thesis by Ρωξάνη Γραφανάκη called Γυναίκες και ροζ λογοτεχνία: η περίπτωση των εκδόσεων Άρλεκιν and available from here.