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.

RWA Academic Grant Awarded, What's New to the Wiki and a Couple of Other Links

Laura Vivanco

The 2017 RWA Academic Research Grant has been awarded to:

Dr. Kate Brown, Huntington University
Dukes, Dowers, Devises, and Demesnes: The Paradoxical Place of English Law in the Historical Romance

RWA awarded funding to Dr. Kate Brown's project, which explores how English common law and constitutionalism give fundamental structure and substance to the historical romance genre.


Dr. Ria Cheyne, [Liverpool Hope] University
The Disability and Romance Project

RWA awarded funding to Dr. Ria Cheyne's project, which seeks to advance the scholarly conversation about disability and romance and will also engage with romance readers, writers and other industry professionals to encourage new conversations about romance, disability and representation.

I've only added a couple of items to the Romance Wiki bibliography recently, so I thought I'd add a few blog posts to today's post:

Anne N. Bornschein took a look at "a romance novel that deals with the history of women’s academic work—particularly in the sciences—and how it has often been erased, dismissed, or appropriated by male colleagues."

Olivia Waite observes that "writers make millions upon millions of tiny, instinctual decisions that add up to internally consistent structures" and suggests it's important to start "recognizing the partly hidden pattern[s]."

And new to the Wiki are:

Cheyne, Ria, 2017. 

"Disability Studies Reads the Romance: Sexuality, Prejudice, and the Happily-Ever-After in the Work of Mary Balogh." Culture - Theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Ed. Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem and Moritz Ingwersen. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. 201-216.

 

Matthews, Amy T., 2016. 

'Entangled: the exegetical process of a romance writer', Arts and Humanities as Higher Education December 2016.

Dr Amy T. Matthews also writes literary fiction as "Amy T Matthews" and romance fiction as "Tess LeSue." She is hoping to bring her three personae together:

The HEA is a non-negotiable element of romance and one I want to use in my literary romance novel (it is already a staple in my historical romances). The parameters I am giving myself for the literary romance is that it must be structured around at least one romantic relationship between a man and a woman (although there may be more than one), and that it must end optimistically, with a happy ending (although not necessarily the same kind of happy ending as a traditional romance). I do not want to sidestep the inevitability of suffering. I want my characters to experience love and romance in the context of real world pressures – infidelity, mental illness, bereavement  – and I want to face up to the inescapable finality of death, while still (somehow!) managing to reach that optimistic ending. This will be a point of difference between popular romance and my literary novel, and I hope it’s one I can navigate without slipping from ‘romance’ into ‘love story’.