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

Papers that would have been given: PCA/ACA 2020

The PCA/ACA have just released the draft program for their conference which was cancelled this year. Since the papers give an idea of what people in the field have been working on, I thought I'd list what I found.

Rethinking Romance: An Argument for Adding the Genre to Your
Collection
Annie Jansen - Penn State Brandywine

Narrating Histories of Love and Violence: The Civil War and Alyssa
Cole’s A Hope Divided
Sarah Ficke - Marymount University

The Houri and her White Other: Scandal, Race, and Innocence in the
Regency Romance Novel
Semilore Sobande - Brown University

Mapping the Borderlands of Red, White, and Royal Blue’s Alex Claremont-Diaz
Trinidad Linares - Library Associate for the Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives

For Love of the Algorithm: The Kiss Quotient, Math Nerds, and Modern Match-Making
Heather Schell - George Washington University

Surplus Women, Dangerous Men: The Narrative Possibilities of Scandal
Angela Toscano - University of Utah

Surplus Women, Dangerous Men: The Narrative Possibilities of Scandal
Lauren Rosales - University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Angela Toscano

Admitting Impediments; or, the Scandal of Allusiveness in Popular
Romance
Eric Murphy Selinger - DePaul University

Scandalous Love(s): Successful Polyamory and Open Relationships
Lindsay Hayes - Independent Scholar

“Because Historicals Don’t Need To Be Hidden”: Reading Popular
Regency Romances in Twenty-First-Century Pakistan
Javaria Farooqui - University of Tasmania, Australia

The Cultural Translation of Gothic Romance in Taiwan: From Roman-
tic Love to Ideal Motherhood
Fang-Mei Lin - National Taiwan Normal University

Power Structures and Authoritarianism in Paranormal Romance and
Urban Fantasy
Maria Ramos-Garcia - South Dakota State University

Rehabilitation, Not Romanticization: Receiving Rape Myths in The Day
of The Duchess
Phebe duPont - Haverford College

Pleasure and the Erotic as “liberatory projects” in the Black Feminist
Romance
Julie Moody-Freeman - DePaul University

Re-examining Forbidden Tropes: Taboo Love in New Adult Fiction
Josefine Smith - Shippensburg University

Corporate Affairs: Innovative Marketing at Mills & Boon and Harlequin, 1930-1990
Denise Hardesty Sutton - New York City College of Technology - CUNY

Bad For The Boss: Romance Novels and Supervisor/Subordinate Relationships In The Age Of #Metoo.
Carole Viola Bell - Independent Scholar

Happily Ever After: Representation, Disability, and Romance
Meredith Guthrie - University of Pittsburgh

#RomanceClass: The Scandalous Act of Reading Sex Scenes Aloud
Jodi McAlister - Deakin University

New Romance Scholarship Database! Read Radway, Regis and Weaver-Zercher for Free!

Laura Vivanco

I've finished the first stage of the Romance Scholarship Database I've been working on for the past few months: https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/

I'd been missing the old Romance Wiki's bibliography of romance scholarship so I decided to put together a database of romance scholarship. In addition to the basic details about each item I've put in

* tags, so that it's possible to search by topic (albeit some subject areas are huge)

* as many links as possible for each item, to assist in finding it/finding out more about it

* comments about the item (e.g. details about second editions, links to reviews, key quotes if I had the item to hand, particularly if an abstract wasn't readily available online)

The database is here: https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/

There's still quite a bit of non-English-language scholarship to be added, and some of the newest items, but I thought I'd share it now since it's fairly big and doesn't have too many gaps in it.

The tagging for books is perhaps a bit less comprehensive than for the articles because re-reading every book thoroughly would have been even more time-consuming than re-reading all the articles to which I had access. So, in many cases, I went with what I remembered, supplemented by what was in the index. And, obviously, if I didn't have access to the item I just had to make guesses about its content on the basis of the title and the abstract (if I had it).

I've added items about Fifty Shades, Twilight and other texts (e.g. Outlander or genres such as chick lit) where there's a clear link made to romance scholarship. I had to draw a line somewhere or it would have been a much, much larger task.

2) Many university presses are making books free online: https://publicbooks.org/public-books-database/

Of particular interest to romance scholars are:

A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Regis) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3606

Reading the Romance (Radway) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44052

Thrill of the Chaste (Weaver-Zercher) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/21988