New at JPRS: Special Issue on The Sheik (and a bit about teaching romance in Sweden)

The final additions to issue 9 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have now gone online and are (as always) freely available to read, both on the website and in downloadable pdf.

• Love in a Cold Climate? Teaching Popular Romance at a Swedish University
  Maria Nilson and Helene Ehriander
   

[Edited to add: JPRS have just added another article to issue 9

• Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance
  Anne Lancashire

 That was added on 22 December.]

In the Special Issue on The Sheik are:

Introduction to the special issue on The Sheik
Amy Burge

The Oriental Beast: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
Pauline Suwanban

Garçon manqué: A Queer Rereading (of) The Sheik
Jessica Taylor

Olive Skin Chocolate Eyes: Echoes of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
Francesca Pierini

Let’s Not Get Carried Away by The Sheik
Laura Vivanco

The Sheik and Modernism
Ellen Turner

The Depiction of Masculinity and Nationality in The Sheik
jay Dixon

In Defence of the Perverse: Reflections on The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Elisabetta Girelli

On Eligible Princes: The Medieval Modernity of Sheikh Romance
Amira Jarmakani

Review essay on The Sheik
Amy Burge and Rachel Robinson

On Teaching, Not Teaching, and Teaching The Sheik
Eric Murphy Selinger

Authors on The Sheik: A conversation with Liz Fielding
Elizabeth Cole

Congratulations and Recent Publications

First of all, I'd like to congratulate the 2020 winners of the RWA Academic Research Grant. The

RWA Academic Grant Committee has recommended and the RWA Board of Directors has approved Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman, an Associate Professor in African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University, and Hannah E. Scupham, a doctoral student in Literature at the University of Kansas, as recipients of the 2021 RWA Academic Research Grant. 

and here are more details about the research for which they've received the grants:

‘Lift as We Climb’: Black Romance Writers, Social Justice, and Institution Building, Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman

Grant funds will be used to aid in her research that will examine black writers’ representations of racial uplift in which their romantic plots and produce one season of the Black Romance Podcast, which documents the history of the production and publication of Black Romance through Dr. Moody-Freeman’s conversations with writers, editors, journalists, and scholars.

 

Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading and Reimagination of the Victorian Past, Hannah E. Scupham

Grant funds will be used to fund dissertation research. Scupham’s work focuses on how contemporary popular romance novels set in the nineteenth-century century seek to challenge and change modern readers’ imaginations of the nineteenth-century, specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

Here are some recent publications, one of which, by Caroline Duvezin-Caubet, touches on the same area of research as Scupham's, and it's free to read online.

Duvezin-Caubet, Caroline, 2020. "Gaily Ever After: Neo-Victorian M/M Genre Romance for the Twenty-First Century." Neo-Victorian Studies 13.1: 242-269.

Intan, Tania, 2020. "Formula Romance Dalam Perfect Romance Karya Indah Hanaco: Kajian Sastra Feminis." Alayasastra 16.2: 301-316. [More details here.]

Murias, Rosana, 2021. "In Grey and Pink: The Image of the Bride through the Spanish Postwar Novela Rosa." The Bride in the Cultural Imagination: Screen, Stage, and Literary Productions. Ed. Jo Parnell. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 17-34. [More details here.]