Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Congratulations to Jayashree Kamblé for Award to Work on BIPOC Authors and Editors

It's just been announced that Jayashree Kamblé has been awarded one of the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships for 2021 for this exciting project:

BIPOC Writers, Editors, and Novels: The Missing Chapters in the Story of Mass-Market Romance

The contributions of BIPOC authors and editors of mass-market romance have often existed on the fringes of the genre’s scholarship. This project centers these sidelined histories through archival research on interviews, reviews, and industry newsletters, as well as close readings of romance novels starring BIPOC, and authored and edited by BIPOC. The project identifies BIPOC progenitors of romance novels in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through two foci: African American editor Vivian Stephens, who sought out and nurtured Black romance, and publishers who either marginalized non-white romance writing or made it visible. Retrieving these biographies and novels fleshes out the history on BIPOC romance and disrupts this popular form’s seeming whiteness. As the genre now confronts its lack of diversity and role in normalizing bigotry, documenting BIPOC romance history shows how the industry contributed to our contemporary reactionary zeitgeist but also how it can combat it.

Jayashree is one of only "28 scholars [who] will each receive up to $40,000 to advance their respective projects, which significantly expand humanistic study and knowledge" (ACLS).

Congratulations, Jayashree!

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Congratulations to a new Doctor of Romance: Vassilikí Véros!

As she announced here, Vassilikí Véros now has

a PhD! With typical Covid fanfare, my conferral was emailed to me today. As I don’t own a floppy graduation hat, I donned my fave tiara (yes I own more than 1), my fave conference dress and took some pics with my fave romance fiction book

Since one advantage of this is that we can all join this virtual "graduation ceremony" I thought I'd post her photo here.

The PhD is titled "What the Librarians Did: The Marginalisation of Romance Fiction Through the Practices of Public Librarianship" and it's in Information and Knowledge Management/Digital Information Management, from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Since it's not currently available online, here's a list of Vassilikí's existing publications about romance, most of which are free to access:

Veros, Vassiliki (2012) "The Romance Reader and the Public Library." Australian Library Journal 61.4:298-306 [Free Access]
 
Veros, Vassiliki (2015) "A Matter of Meta: Category Romance Fiction and the Interplay of Paratext and Library Metadata." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 5.1 [Free Access]
 
Veros, Vassiliki (2017) "Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves." Proceedings from the Document Academy 4.1 [Free Access]

Veros, Vassiliki (2019) "Metatextual Conversations: The Exclusion/Inclusion of Genre Fiction in Public Libraries and Social Media Book Groups." Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association 68.3:254-267 [Abstract]

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 [Free Access]

Congratulations Vassilikí!