Teach Me Tonight

Dissertation Season (and some other new publications)

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:51:40 +0000

Lucynka Starron has found an article from 1934 giving advice to would-be romance authors targetting the romance pulps.

---

Balle, Mary, Danny Valdez, and Tori Sciara. 2026. “Adeline’s Desire: Conversation between Paranoid and Reparative Readings of Eroticism, Relationships, and Sexual Behaviours in the Dark Romance Haunting Adeline.” Porn Studies. [Abstract here.]

Brenner, Naomi (2025). "Sabine vs. Aviva: Translation and Popular Fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew." Yod 25.

Burmeister, Aurora Grace (2026). Where Love and Obsession Overlap: An Examination of Dark Romance, BookTok, and Moral Outrage. Master of Arts, Bowling Green State University.

Burge, Amy (2026). "A Decolonised Alpha Hero? Negotiating Masculinities in Nigerian Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

Eskelsen, Ilse (2026). “I Know He Would Do Anything if I Asked”: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Female Power Fantasy, and the YA Romance. Undergraduate Dissertation, Brigham Young University.

Hildebrandt, Addie. (2026). "The Ripped Bodice, Brooklyn." World Literature Today 100.3: 80. [Excerpt here.]

Horan, Molly (2026). “Thanks For Listening: A Novel” And “Asexuality in Young Adult Literature: How Ace/Aro YA Challenges Amatonormativity and Expands Possibilities.” PhD, Bath Spa University.

Lu, Jie (2026). "Chinese Online Fiction: A New Romantic Imagination." The International Journal of Literary Humanities 24.1: 35-58.

Montejo, Aurora (2026). "Guilty Pleasure or Attack on Feminism?: An Analysis of the Dark Romance Subgenre." The Odyssey: Undergraduate Arts & Humanities Academic Journal 1: 7-18.

Niebergall, Chelsee M. (2026). Resistance and Innovation: The Cultural Work of Popular Romance Novels. Master's Thesis, Dartmouth College.

Noriega Palmero, Jessica Alejandra. 2026. «¿Del quiosco a la revolución amorosa? Un análisis genológico y estructural de tres novelas rosas anarquistas de Federica Montseny». Literatura popular: lecturas y público en la Edad de Plata. Ed. Emilio José Ocampos Palomar and Guadalupe Nieto Caballero. Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag. [Details for the volume at https://doi.org/10.3726/b23272. Excerpts from the article here.]

Panek, Helena (2026). "Getting Her Off: Looking at Women Authors in Romance Compared to Other Fiction Genres." Honors thesis, Eastern Kentucky University.

Rayburn, Allison D. (2026). An Ecology of the Monstrous: How Readers Shape and Are Shaped by Monster Romance. Master of Arts in Professional Writing, Kennesaw State University.

Sukmaningsih, Putri Ayresti and Rahayu Puji Haryanti (2026). "Marriage as a Mechanism of Power in Regency Era in Quinn’s Bridgerton the Duke and I." IDEAS: Journal on Language Teaching and Learning, Linguistics and Literature 14.1:1701-1713.

Tomas, Marina (2026). "Truhelkin Plein air: feministička romansa?" Kroatologija : časopis za hrvatsku kulturu Fakulteta hrvatskih studija Sveučilišta u Zagrebu 17.1: 7-24.

Vaile, Dezi (2026). They Write Themselves: Romancing the Vampire of Lighthouse Landing. Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Liberty University.

Call for Papers: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:36:34 +0000

123rd Annual Conference (Seattle, WA) – Nov. 12-15, 2026

More details about the conference can be found here. Specifically with respect to romance, Kristin Noone has put out this call for papers to the brand-new popular romance area:

Popular romance narratives are compellingly woven into popular culture, from the success of queer hockey phenomenon Heated Rivalry to the perpetual popularity of Hallmark rom-com movies, from historical or alternate-historical romances like Julia Quinn's Bridgerton series to the rise of romantasy and authors such as Sarah J. Maas. The romance tradition is rich and complex, appearing across various forms of media and spanning the globe.
For this special session, we invite papers and presentations which explore the diversity of popular romance narratives. This year's general PAMLA conference theme is “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” and submissions related to the distribution of power, aristocracy or inheritance, community and collective action, class or social structures (or challenges thereto), and revolutionary movements against traditional hierarchies are particularly welcome. However, we are open to all popular-romance themed proposals, regardless of how closely they adhere to the general conference theme!
Potential topics might include, for example:

-cultural memory, history, and the romance novel

-reading the romance as reparative - or investigating this concept

-heroes, anti-heroes, and masculinity

-aristocrats, billionaires, and power

-inheritance, histories, and haunting, and/or the Gothic

-representations of class, gender, race, and social structures

-romantasy, fantasy, and centering pleasure as activism
-popular romance trends, e.g. historical, queer, or dark romance

-fandom and community

-discussions of creative work in the field

-and more!

The deadline for abstracts is the 25th of May and should be submitted via the form on the website.

New Publications: An A-Z

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:09:00 +0000

Allan, Jonathan A. (2026). "Men’s Dress in Popular Romance Novels." The Intellect Handbook of Men’s Fashion. Ed. Ben Barry, Andrew Reilly and José Blanco F. Intellect Books. [This is due to be published on 10 April, 2026. More details about the volume can be found here.]

Bhatta, H. (2026). "To what extent does age-gap romanticization in modern BookTok romance fiction normalize predatory dynamics?. Sudurpaschim Spectrum, 3(1-2), 90–102. [I am not going to provide a direct link to this because I was upset to discover that some of the works cited do not exist/do not exist as cited. I did not check all the works, because I felt I had done enough work to engender doubts about the quality of the research. Details can be found in the entry at the RSDB.]

Clasen, Tricia (2026) "Changing the Scripts: An Overview of Gender and Romance in Young Adult Literature " The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature, Ed. Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 99-112. [Excerpt available here.]

Evans, Anne-Marie (2026). "Romancing the First Lady " The First Lady in Contemporary Popular Culture, ed. Anne-Marie Evans and Sarah Trott. New York: Bloomsbury. 113-128. [Links here.]

Gow, Alicia Giselle Jeanneta and Friska Dita (2026). "Piper Bellinger as a Round Character in Tessa Bailey’s It Happened One Summer." BLESS: Bilingualism, Language, and Education Studies 6.1:25-31.

Jackson, Nicole M. (2026). "Love in Black and Black: A Brief History of Black Romance." 2026 African American Booklist. Detroit Public Library.

Jones, Cerys (2026). "Romance Readers and the Politics of Literary Taste in Twentieth Century Britain." Plurality 4: 46-53.

Kamblé, Jayashree (2026). "Recolouring the romcom: humor, respectability, and race in a 1986 American category romance novel." Comedy Studies. Online First. [Abstract here.]

Leigh, Alicia (2026). "Romancing the Darkness: Understanding Trauma in the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

Maji, Susmita (2026) "Critiquing Heteronormativity in Queer Young Adult Fiction of Casey McQuiston’s Red White & Royal Blue." Shodhpatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities 3.3:34-39.

Maranto Hill, Emily (2025). Reading the Romance Reader: Booktok, Algorithmic Subjugation, and the Fight for Cultural Legitimacy. Master of Arts thesis, Old Dominion University.

Miller, Jessica (2026). "Vulnerability and Chronic Illness in Three Contemporary Romance Novels." The Journal of Medical Humanities. [Abstract here.]

Schell, Heather et al (2026). "Defining the Trope in Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Online First.

Yulianti, Fiki Indah (2025). "Digital Wattpad Culture In Indonesia: Youth, Romance, And The Changing Practices Of Reading And Writing." Journal of Literary Prose and Society 2.2.

Zhang, Yue (2026). "A Semantic and Communicative Translation Analysis of Chapter Eight of The Love Hypothesis." Literature, Language and Cultural Studies 4.3: 104-110.

Call for Papers: Sports Romance

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:36:00 +0000

From JPRS:

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its special issue on Sport Romance.

Narratives intertwining sport culture with popular romance have steadily grown in popularity throughout the last fifty years, spiking most recently with the release of streaming drama Heated Rivalry, adapted from the novels of Rachel Reid. Increasingly, popular romance set against the backdrop of elite athleticism and featuring one, if not two or more, professional athletes, have become a substantial facet of the romance literary and media landscape. Despite the significant success of this subgenre of popular romance, scholarly investigations have thus far been limited. This special issue therefore is devoted to igniting wide-ranging, exploratory and original discussion on the topic of sport romance.

Adopting an expansive definition of sport and leisure, these articles may consider sports, games and pastimes ranging from international leagues to community clubs to sports that push the limit of the term such as autoracing, gaming and gambling, as represented in romance fiction, film and TV, fanfic and other forms of transformative culture and media. We invite submissions from a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to: cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, publishing studies, history, celebrity studies, sports studies and fan studies.

Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

Sports in romance narratives in a variety of media, including but not limited to: genre fiction, memoir, screen media, music, or in the teaching of these media.
The significance of self-publishing in contemporary sport romance
The relationship between sport fan communities, romance fan communities and sport romance fiction
‘BookTok’ and the impact of sport romance fan behaviour on athletes
Precursors to contemporary sport romance such as Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles and Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Chicago Stars
Portrayals of gender difference and subversion in sport romance
Class, wealth and celebrity in sport romance
Queer themes and homophobia within sport culture as explored in sport romance
Young Adult sport romance and the pedagogical interventions endeavoured by sport romance in young people’s physical activity

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and bios of no more than 100 words to Atlanta Tsiaoukkas (at839@cam.ac.uk) by 31st May 2026. Full articles of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, will be due by 1 December 2026. Please note that all research articles submitted to this special issue of JPRS will undergo peer review via a double blind, pre-publication peer review policy.

Scholar Seeking Romance Podcast Listeners

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:37:00 +0000

Survey on Podcasts about Romance Fiction

Study Title: Multimodal Playgrounds: Democratizing Romance Readership through Romance Fiction Podcast Communities
Principal Investigator: Dr. Precie A. Schroyer, Northampton Community College

You are being asked to take part in a research study on podcasts about romance fiction.

Purpose The purpose of this research project is to examine the popularity of podcasts about romance fiction and how they may affect romance readership engagement. Your participation involves completing an anonymous online survey regarding your experiences with listening to and/or watching such podcasts.

More details here.

New Publications: Autism, Book Selling, Dark Romance, Ethnicity, Happiness, History, Readers

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:05:00 +0000

Bogaert, Anthony F., Jessie E. Hernder and , Jessica R. Johnson (2026). "Who “Feels Sexy” in the Google Books Corpus? Text-Mining Evidence for Gender Differences in Object of Desire Self-Consciousness." Archives of Sexual Behavior. [Abstract here.]

Datta, Sreepurna (2026). "Around the world on Amazon: Locating diasporic Indian romance novels published by Harlequin Mills & Boon." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.

Deane, Katie (2026). "Dark romance: an introduction." Porn Studies.

Eimannsberger, Angelina (2026). "The Romance Shop Around the Corner: How Women Readers Created a New Kind of Independent Bookstore." The New Americanist 4.1-2. [Abstract here.]

Grant, Ania (2025). Evolution, Feminism, and Romantic Fiction: From Mr. Darcy to Mr. Big London: Routledge. [Abstract here.]

Handley-Cousins, Sarah (2026). "Love Is a Battlefield: Civil War Memory in Modern Romance Novels." They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America. Ed. John M. Kinder and Jennifer M. Murray. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 152-169. [Excerpt here.]

Majidi, Nikki (2026) "Fast Fiction": Booktok, Artificial Intelligence, and the Profit-driven Reinvention of the Romance Genre. Undergraduate Dissertation, California State University, Long Beach.

Miller, Jessica (2026). ""I Shall Be Very Happy, Indeed": The Meanings of Happiness in Bridgerton" Bridgerton and Philosophy: Dukes, Debutantes, and Deep Questions . Ed. Jessica Miller. Wiley. [This article is free online. The remained of the volume is not. I have more details about that volume here. It won't be available until March.]

Musiał-Pudełko, Aleksandra (2026) "'You and Me and History': Queer Romance and Liberal Fantasy in Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue." Erotic Discourses in History, Culture and the Arts. Ed. Aleksandra Musiał-Pudełko, Nina Augustynowicz, Agnieszka Podruczna. New York: Routledge. [Abstract here.]

Niebergall, Chelsee M. (2026) "Constructing Hybrid Identities: Cultural Negotiation and Belonging in Uzma Jalaluddin's Ayesha at Last," CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal: Vol. 17: No. 2, Article 16.

Parnell, Claire (2025). "The Politics of Algorithmic Hyper(in)visibility: BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Erotic Romance Fiction on Amazon." Érudit 16.2: 1–28.

Segura Candado, Leyre (2025). Love Beyond Conventions: Contemporary Romance and the Representation of Non-Normative Bodies. Undergraduate Dissertation, Universidad de Zaragoza.

Smith, Evelyn (2025). Correlations Between Parasocial Tendencies and Self-Esteem Among Romance Readers. Honors thesis, Columbus State University.

Vargová, Veronika (2025). "‘What will you do with yourself when you grasp that your mind is only different, not deranged?’: Madness and Neurodivergent Heroes in Historical Romance Novels." The Journal of Historical Fictions 6.1:45-66.

Vargová, Veronika (2025). Happily Ever After, Differently: Reimagining Autism and Intimacy in Popular Romance Novels. PhD, Masaryk University.

New Publications: Teaching, Translation, Sex, Psychoanalysis, Subgenres and more

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:05:00 +0000

Allen, Amanda K. (2025) "Introducing (Un)defined YA / Series / Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Aulia, Aura Ratu, Griselda Callista, Hasya Ashila Supriatna, Muhammad Ihsan Fadhilah, Syifa Hana Nabila, and Zaira Yasmina Faizal. 2025. “A Comparison Study of the Effects of Romantic Films and Fictional Stories on Romantic Beliefs Among Young Adults”. Psikologi Prima 8 (2):222-38.

Clitheroe, Heather (2025). "Teaching Romance and Erotica: Designing a Consent-based, Trauma-informed Online Classroom." Journal of Integrated Studies 16.2:1-10.

Costa, Manoela dos Santos da (2025). The trope enemies to lovers : an analysis of Book Lovers and Love, Theoretically. Undergraduate Dissertation, Universidade federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Crawford, Joseph (2025). “‘I'm Alright, It's Just so Horrible’: Teaching Romance Fictions, Pre‐ and Post‐#MeToo.” Literature Compass 22.4.

Cuthbert, Kate (2026). How to Judge a Book by its Cover: New Analytical Tools for the Book Covers and Titles. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. [An excerpt can be found here. I'm guessing it's based on Kate Cuthbert's thesis, details of which can be found here.]

Echaoui, Assala and Nada Ferdjallah (2025). The Power of Gossip: A Feminist Analysis of Julia Quinn's Romancing Mister Bridgerton (2002). Masters, Université 8 mai 1945 - GUELMA.

Hines, Christian M. (2025). "Main Character Energy: Black Girls Getting the Love They Deserve in Elise Bryant’s Young Adult Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14

Hnatiuk, Daryna (2025). Translation project: Translating humour and witty elements in the romantic comedy novel Bananapants by Penny Reid. MA thesis, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University.

Johnson, Natasha (2025). "Computing the Formal and Institutional Boundaries of Contemporary Genre and Literary Fiction." Anthology of Computers and the Humanities 1.

Keeler, Janet K. (2025) "Romance In The Round: A Content Analysis Of YA Novels About Fat Girls Looking For Love." International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 6.10: 9-16.

Kollman, Kathleen W. Taylor (2026). The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024. New York: Bloomsbury. [The author said that "There are two romance novels covered: Madam President, an F/F romance by Blayne Cooper and T. Novan, and Red White and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston (as well as its film adaptation). I also talk in here a bit about lesbian romances in particular." There's an excerpt available here.]

Lathifah, Naafiatun Nur and Adjie Aditya Sanjaya (2025). "Political And Economic Ideology In The Production, Distribution, And Consumption Process Of Popular Romance Literature On The Wattpad Application." International Conference of Humanities and Social Science (ICHSS) 5: 516–525.

Lauritzen, Kiara (2025). Wallpaper Historicism: Chronotopic Regency romance, popular history and British cultural imperialism. Master's, Malmö University.

Meredith, Tami, Maryanne Fisher and Nicole Giddens (2025, though online first). “Babies, Brides, and Billionaires: Computational and Linguistic Analysis of Harlequin Romance Novel Cover Text.” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. [Abstract]

Nicholls, Georgia. (2025). "Between the sheets: physiological sex acts in the contemporary romance novel." Porn Studies.

Novakova, Iva, Olivier Kraif and Marion Gymnich (2025). "Exploring the ‘language of intimacy’ in English and French romance novels by means of a corpus-driven approach." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. Online First. [Abstract]

Palmer, Margaret M. (2025). “Stop Acting Like a Diva”: Responses to Sexual Violence in Young Adult Romance Novels. SSM - Qualitative Research in Health.

Parnell, Claire (2025). "Platform Paratext: Reading Amazon Book Product Pages." Book History 28.2: 349-369. [Abstract]

Raste, Anđela (2025). Classification of PUs in Julia Quinn's Bridgerton: The Viscount Who Loved Me. Masters thesis, University of Zadar.

Raveh, Noam (2025). "The Debasement of Love and its Cure in Romance: Psychoanalysis and Healing Through Feminization in Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Ripoll Fonollar, Mariana (2025). “Romanticising the Suffragette: Historical Romances and the Commodification of the Cause.” Archivum 75.2: 465-501. [The article is open access. In the entry in the RSDB I have added a note about reader responses to it.]

Stevens, Alyssa, Roulstone, Sariah, Baker, Matthew J., Bergeson, Susanna

Housley, Yulin, Wood, Taylor (2025). "Book Descriptions Across Genres: A Content Analysis of “Contemporary Romance” and “Mystery and Thriller” Descriptions." Publishing Research Quarterly. [Abstract]

Stevenson, London (2025). Unbound Subgenres: Age Categorizations in Contemporary Romance and their Implications. Masters thesis, University of Alabama in Huntsville. [Excerpt]

Tahreem, and Fatima Umay (2025). "Love Across Time: A Comparative Study of Romantic Expression in 19th-Century and Contemporary Fiction." Journal of Applied Linguistics and TESOL 8.4:1370-1378.

Tebaldi, Catherine (2025). "Sex and the Supremacy of Christ: Sex and Romance in Christian Nationalism." On Christian Nationalism: Critical and Theological Perspectives. Ed. David M. Gides and Joan Braune. London: Routledge. 168-183. [Abstract. There is a short section on romance, but the name of the romance author is given incorrectly.]

Vargová, Veronika (2025). "Evolving Portrayals: From Freak Shows to Autism Representation in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

Wallin Lämsä, Camilla (2025). Yearning Hours: Desire, Darcymania, and Readerly Attachments in the Digital Jane Austen Fandom. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.

Witherspoon, Steve (2025). "Women Running from Houses: How Gothic Romance Paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s Adapted a Romantic-era Visual Language of Women in Danger." Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 38.2.

and finally an article which isn't exactly academic, but an obituary for a literary author, Fanny Howe, because

In the beginning, before the books she wrote under her own name, there were two romance novels about nurses. In discussions of Howe’s work, they are treated as a footnote, another charming detail in a life rich with incident. But read looking backward, having seen all that came later, the nurse novels come to look like more than a curiosity. Instead, they are the place where Howe first experienced the plotting of a novel as a kind of existential struggle; where she began working through, in writing, the questions that would sustain and bewilder her. They deserve the kind of careful attention Howe’s later work often likened to a spiritual imperative.

This article, by Meghan Racklin, gives them that attention.

Harlequin France and AI Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:37:00 +0000

I've just seen some bad news for the translators employed by Harlequin in France. From Livreshebdo:

Harlequin a contacté en novembre les traductrices et traducteurs de la collection « Azur » pour leur annoncer la fin de leur collaboration, rapportent l'Association des traducteurs littéraires de France et le collectif En chair et en os. En difficulté, la collection de romances courtes sera désormais traduite par l'agence de communication Fluent Planet qui s'appuie notamment sur des outils d'intelligence artificielle, confirme HarperCollins France, maison mère d'Harlequin.

I'll try translating that myself (without using AI!):

According to the Society of Literary Translators of France and the "In Flesh and Bone" group, in November Harlequin contacted the translators employed on the "Azur" series to announce the end of their collaboration. Harper Collins, Harlequin's parent company, confirmed that from now on this series of short romances will be translated by the communications agency Fluent Planet, which relies heavily on AI products.

The full text of the press release issued by the groups supporting the translators can be found here (in French).

University of Liverpool's Online Romance Course

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:30:00 +0000

Dr Sam Hirst (who runs Romancing the Gothic) will be teaching "Falling in love with love: A History of Popular Romance", a course comprising 10 weekly sessions online (via Zoom), on Wednesdays at 6 - 7.30pm UK time, starting from Wednesday 21 January.

There will be "online learning materials for you to engage with before and after each live session" and the course fee is £155 (concessions £80).

This module will explore the evolution of romance writing from the 18th century to the current day, looking not only at the novel but at the intertwined relationship between the romance novel and cinema. [...]
This course is aimed at romance readers and anyone who wants to explore the best-selling genre and most influential genre in publishing. Each week there will be a set text but extracts will also be provided as we are aware that participants will need to prioritise their reading.

Syllabus

Amatory Fiction: 18th-Century Women Writing Desire
- Text: Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)
The Society Romance: Austen and her Legacy
- Text: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995, dir. Simon Langton)
The Rise of the Byronic Hero
- Text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Orientalism and the Romance
- Text: E. M. Hull, The Sheik (1919)
- The Sheik (dir. Melford, US, 1921)
The Regency Romance
- Text: Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (1951)
- The Reluctant Widow (Knowles, UK, 1950)
Mills and Boon, Category Romance and the 'Nursies'
- Betty Neels, Tabitha in Moonlight (1972)
Race and Romance
- Beverley Jenkins, Indigo (1996)
The Romantic Comedy and Second Chance Romance
- Texts: The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor, US, 1940)
- The Lovebirds (dir. Michael Showalter, US, 2020)
Queering the Romance
- Text: Olivia Waite, Hen Fever (2020)
Romantasy, Mixed Genres, and the future(s) of Romance
- Text: Tasha Suri, The Isle of the Silver Sea (2025)

Full details can be found on the University of Liverpool's website.

CFP: International Women's Writing Online Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:23:00 +0000

I got an email letting me know about this and since it mentions romance, I thought I'd share the call for papers:

International Women’s Writing Online Conference

Thursday 15^th to Friday 16^th January 2026

Online

This online conference will be an interdisciplinary, cross-period, and global exploration of the role and impact of women’s writing, which is dedicated to the discussion of a broad range of women’s writing from any time, period, and place. We will discuss the popular and the literary; bestsellers and genres; poetry and prose; screen and script; writing for games and digital spaces; creative non-fiction; life-writing, biography, and memoir; and journalism and other forms of cultural production.

We will be thinking and talking about the pasts, presents, and futures of women’s writing on a global scale. We will explore women’s voices and artistic practices; the changing landscape of and about women’s writing; forms and mediums; the archival and the digital; textual and sexual politics; resistance and re-imaginings; interventions and intersections; and all of this across a wide range of disciplines, time periods, and texts.

We hope you will join us for this exciting event, which will bring together scholars, researchers, students, and enthusiasts to share their research, insights, and perspectives in an open and inclusive atmosphere. We welcome submissions for individual twenty-minute papers as well as for full panels and workshops. And we are keen to explore women’s writing from any time period, as well as in any genre or form. Subjects can include (but are not bound by):

· The portrayal and evolution of women’s writing across different periods and genres

· Archives and memorialisation

· Pasts, presents, and futures

· Women’s writing on page, stage, and screen

· The poetics of women’s writing

· Creative practices and performance

· Writing place and space

· Bestsellers and the popular

· Women writing for the screen

· Cultural, historical, and social contexts

· Reframing history and envisioning futures

· Traditional and digital forms of women’s writing

· The global and the local

· Autoethnography and authorship; memory and memorialisation

· The figure of the author: celebrity, fans, and representations

· Race, class, gender, and resistance

· Activism and protest; freedoms and oppression

· Writing technologies

· Women’s writing and pleasure

· Intersectionality and dualities

· Women’s literary canon

· The speculative and the imaginary

· Women in and writing games

· Crime Fiction, the Gothic, and Horror

· Bonkbusters, Romance, and Erotica

· The pre- and post-#MeToo landscape

· Multicultural approaches and practices

· Women’s writing and form

· Women’s writing and the market

· The economics and politics of women’s writing

Submissions:

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250–300 words, a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), and contact details. Panel proposals are very welcome.

Please submit your proposals in a Word document to the team at womenswritingassociation@gmail.com by 12^th December 2025 making it clear that this is for the online conference. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including early career researchers, and postgraduate students. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome.

Please note that this will be a small online conference and we will shortly have two CFPs out for in-person conferences, which will be held at Falmouth University in June 2026 and Pescara University, Italy in September 2026.

All participants will be given free membership of the International Women’s Writing Association for a year.

Call for doctoral proposals in the field of Romance and/or Erotica at Falmouth University

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:16:00 +0000

Thought I'd add an image from the Falmouth University website showing where Falmouth is i.e. towards the tip of Cornwall (i.e. the lower left-hand corner of the UK).

The study of Romance and Erotica in their broadest forms is now being given more prominence in the academic field, albeit through often disparate strands. This is surprising given their popularity. For example, Romantic Fiction has long been one of the most popular genres of writing, outselling most other forms. However, despite its wide readership, it faces questions about the lack of diverse representation, as well as frequent attention being drawn to, for example, racist tropes of the othered body in both Romance and Erotica. Debates about the blurred boundaries surrounding pornography and Erotica similarly rage, as questions of ethics and morality circle.

How are narratives of Romance/Erotica mediated through history? How do other cultures and societies represent and interrogate Romance/Erotica? How are images, narratives, and notions of Romance/Erotica read and understood through time and place? How do we navigate questions of consent? Bodily boundaries? Morality? Race? How do they engage with issues such as class? Capitalism? Power/control? Sex and sexualities? How do they respond to and shape attitudes towards contemporary cultural concerns such as digital media; pornography; gender roles; sexual relationships; sex work; consent; ageing; mental health; sexual and physical health; the law; politics; and crime. How do they engage with celebrity culture, fashion, and place?

We are seeking ground-breaking, innovative, and challenging practice-based and critical research proposals on Romance and/or Erotica in their widest sense, including, but not limited to, Bonkbusters and bestsellers, soap operas and mini-series, Gothic and Pulp Romances, melodrama and fantasy, popular magazines and literary Erotica, Hollywood and Bollywood, Romcoms and sitcoms, high and low culture, the sensational and the scandalous, digital depictions and heartwarming tales, the private and the public, Hallmark and Pornhub.

Proposals on creative writing, literature, history, fashion, illustration, film, TV, popular culture, performance studies, games, and many other genres and mediums will be considered.

More details here.

A very long list of new (and some not so new) publications about romance

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:16:00 +0000

The open access journal TEXT dedicated a special issue to romance/romantic fiction, under the subtitle "Trope Actually – Popular Romance" but it wasn't just about romances in the 'central romantic relationship +HEA' sense: there were pieces of short fiction as well as an article on bonkbusters and another on historical fiction. You can find the whole issue here.

Here, though, is a list of the articles in it which focus on romance:

Matthews, Amy, Justina Ashman, Millie Heffernan, Payton Hogan, Abby Guy, Harrison Stewart, Kathleen Stanley, Alex Cothren, and Elizabeth Duffield. 2025. “Editorial: Degrees of Love and Trope Actually.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–7.

O’Mahony, Lauren, and Yolandi Botha. 2025. “Reading the Romance in Australia: The Preferences and Practices of Romance Readers from ARRA Survey Data.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–22.

Matthews, Amy, Alex Cothron, and Rachel Hennessy. 2025. “Happily Ever after in the Age of Climate Crisis: The Argument for ‘Cli-Ro.’” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–18.

Mulvey, Alexandra, and Hsu-Ming Teo. 2025. “‘You’re a Total Dick Sometimes, but It’s a Tolerable Kind of Dickishness’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sports Romances.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–20.

Rouse, Lucy. 2025. “A Real Bad Boy: How Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us Exploits Romance Tropes.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–17.

---

Moving on to other new (or at least new to the database) publications:

Abdul Majid, Amrah (2025). “Faith, Love and Spiritual Growth in Norhafsah Hamid’s Will You Stay? and Will You Love Me?.” Akademika 95.2: 319-332.

Aprieska, Rizkana and Bayu Kristianto (2025). "Penerjemahan Portmanteau dari Bahasa Inggris ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia dalam Novel Seri The Ravenels 1–4." Linguistik Indonesia 43.2:263-280.

Cho, Hyerim, Denice Adkins, Alicia K. Long, and Diogenes Da Silva Santos. "Webtoon Romance Reading and New Ways to Look at Genre Reading." Library Trends 74, no. 1 (2025): 148-169.

Clement, Ella. 2025. “What Women Actually Want: Professions, Prestige, and Desire in Bestselling Fiction.” SocArXiv. [This is a pre-print and I'm not sure of its final destination. It's not all about romance, but there is a significant section which is.]

García-Aguilar, Alberto (2023). "De la novela rosa a la comedia romántica: Mi marido es usted (1938), de Mercedes Ballesteros, y el guion de Volver a soñar (1942), de Claudio de la Torre y José López Rubio." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 33: 97–118. [I know this one isn't very new, but it describes (in Spanish) a plot with a secret baby, in a novel from 1938, and I thought that was worth noting. I've come across an early Mary Burchell with a secret baby too (another one where the protagonists were married at the point the baby was conceived). Anyway, thought that might be of interest if anyone, at some point, decides to look into the history of various types of romance plot.]

Horáčková, Martina (2025). Exploring Romantasy Tropes: Analysis of Ali Hazelwood’s Bride. Bachelor’s thesis, Silesian University in Opava.

Horpestad, Amalie Fogtmann (2025). Beyond Romance: Generic Innovation in Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters Series. Masters thesis, The University of Bergen.

Karamat, Yashfa and Rukhma Nawaz and Zainab Firdos. (2025). "Negotiating Reality and Fantasy through Magical Realism in Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf." Advance Social Science Archive Journal 4.1: 2860–2876.

Keran, Molly (2025). "Generic Guarantees." Mid Theory Collective. [This was looking at Hoover's It Ends with Us (and contrasting it with Jennifer Crusie's Crazy for You).]

Knowles, Thomas and Christopher Smith (2025). “Female Labour at Bletchley Park: reality and (romantic) fiction.” Intelligence and National Security. Online First. Open access.

Larson, Christine (2025). The labor of love: romance authors and platform solidarity. Journal of Communication. [Abstract available here.]

Martín Coloma, Ricardo, 2025. “On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel.” Journal of American Studies. [Abstract here, though as I mention in my entry for this in the RSDB, I think maybe only one of the two novels looked at has a happy ending for a romantic relationship.]

McAlister, Jodi and Kate Cuthbert (2025). "Romantasy: An overview and a history." Synergy 23.2. [Abstract]

Niebling, Laura (2025). "Consent capital: From Romantasy’s “Alpha male archetypes” toward a new cultural theory in post-digital storytelling." New Media & Society. Online First.

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2025). "The Sweet Bonds of Society: Food Symbolism in Bridgerton." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 15.2.

Pelegrina Gutiérrez, Alicia. (2024). "Los modelos femeninos en Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 35: 139–161.

Pelegrina, Alicia, 2024. “Franquismo y guerra civil en dos novelas rosas: Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre”. Philologica Canariensia 30: 425-441.

Pradhan, Anil, 2025. "Return to Nature, Love: The Queer Potential of Rural Spaces and Travels in Contemporary Indian Gay Romance Fiction." Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities. Ed. Gabriela Jarzębowska-Lipińska, Aleksandra Ross and Krzysztof Skonieczny. Göttingen: V&R unipress. 183-199. [It is open access and should be available as a pdf from https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737018791 (the first page is blank, so keep scrolling!) and/or https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737018791.183 I haven't given it a separate entry in the database because it seems to be based on a chapter of the author's PhD thesis, and also many of the works discussed do not have happy endings, so are "romantic fiction" and not "romance". There are synopses in the thesis but not in this chapter.]

Sare, Madelynn (2025). Assessing The Accessibility Of Queer Romance Book Covers As Digital Thumbnails: An Analysis Of Color Contrast, Colorblind Safety, And Typography Legibility. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University.

van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2025). "Love in Literature: Why Read About It?". International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (2nd edition). Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Springer, Cham.

Viklund, Julia (2025). Romantiska städer och spöken: Genreanvändning i samtida romance med magiska inslag. Bachelor’s thesis, Umeå University.

Romance at the University of Dayton

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:25:00 +0000

Amy Krug, from the University of Dayton, is

happy to report that the University of Dayton (Dayton, Ohio) now has a dedicated collection, the University Libraries Popular Romance Collection. The fun part about this collection is that the books are almost entirely chosen by students. I teach popular romance, and as an experiential learning project a few years ago in those classes I had groups of students choose books (especially those that depict diverse characters) to go in the collection. Students in my classes are still selecting books every semester, with funding from our experiential learning department and our Libraries.
Here is UD's page on the collection:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ul_popularromance/
Secondly, I was recently on The Academic Minute podcast discussing reading
romance as an act of resistance:
https://academicminute.org/amy-krug-university-of-dayton-reading-romance-as-an-act-of-resistance/

CFP: Book Series on Romance, Power and Desire

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:08:00 +0000

I'll transcribe the contents of this flyer below. I'm on the Board, as are some other romance scholars, so there's definitely an openness to proposals including/focussed on popular romance fiction, although obviously the series is very much not limited to that.

University of Wales Press

Romance, Power and Desire

New Series from the University of Wales Press

Romance, Power and Desire provides a focus for scholarly debates in the humanities around sexual/romantic power and agency, fantasy and social reality, relationships and sexual practices.

The series is global in scope and interdisciplinary in nature; it comprises of cutting-edge research in monographs and edited collections across a broad historical period, from the ancient world to the present day.

Series Editors: Dr Jo Parsons Falmouth University and Dr Meredith Miller Cardiff University

Would you like to write for this series? We’d love to hear from you. Please contact Chris Richards, Journals and Assistant Commissioning Editor, with your proposal, including a brief synopsis of the proposed work: chris.richards@press.wales.ac.uk

To read more on the information we require at proposal stage, see our Publish With Us page https://www.uwp.co.uk/publish-with-us/ .

CFP: PCA Conference in Atlanta, April 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:31:00 +0000

From their website:

The Romance Area of the National Popular Culture Association is soliciting abstracts for the next annual conference, to held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia.

CFP: Reading the Romance Reader

Upload your 250-word proposal to pcaaca.org by November 30, 2025

What does it mean to be a romance reader (or viewer, or listener, or any other type of consumer)? Forty years ago, “creators” and “audience” were understood as binary opposites, reader response theory felt like a cutting-edge approach to genre fiction, and the idea of “participatory culture” wasn’t even a gleam in Henry Jenkins’ eye. Since that time, both Romancelandia and the scholarly tools for understanding and navigating it have blossomed. Romance readers have more opportunities to communicate their preferences to authors, publishers, and other readers, giving them more influence over the genre. Multiple modalities mean that romance enthusiasts can access new narratives more immediately, in more locations, in more formats, and, if they choose, with less visibility. At the same time, the romance genre is enjoying a moment of public pride, and romance readers are visible—to the public, to each other, online, in real life, to publishers and to bookstores—in an unprecedented way.

We believe that romance scholarship has also entered a golden age (thank you, JPRS!), with scholars from different disciplines and different countries bringing fresh ideas, exploring new or overlooked texts and modalities, and introducing field-specific analytical tools that offer a richer understanding of people’s engagement with popular romance. We therefore think it’s past time to turn our collective attention to the consumers of popular romance. For our 2026 conference, we invite you to reread the romance reader (or viewer, listener, LARPer, etc.). Showcase your favorite romance community, show off your data, teach us how to use your methods, offer a case study of public engagement with romance, theorize the affordances of reading vs listening vs viewing the romance, or take a deep dive into the historical changes in what it means to be part of the audience for popular romance.

---

There are more details, which you can find here. Note that:

"If you would rather explore some other aspect of popular romance right now, you are very welcome to ignore our theme and submit a proposal on something else."

and

"Scholars, romance writers, romance readers/viewers, romance industry professionals, librarians, and any combination of these are welcome. You do not need to be an academic or have an institutional affiliation to be part of the Romance area."

Looking for Participants: Romance and AI Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:39:00 +0000

From Bridget Kies:

I am conducting a research study to understand the attitudes romance readers and writers have toward generative artificial intelligence use in the romance industry.
I am recruiting individuals who are over the age of 18 and who identify as a romance reader or writer to take a brief survey online.
This survey will take approximately 15 minutes. Your participation in this study is voluntary. Your answers will be submitted anonymously. If you wish to participate in the study, you can use the anonymous link below.
If you have any questions about the research, please contact me at bkies@oakland.edu or 248-370-2261.
Please feel free to share the survey link with any other romance readers or writers who might be interested in participating.
https://oakland.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5zQN2obtFueDnTM

CFP: Love and Resistance: Popular Romance Fiction and the Right, 2015-2025

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:43:00 +0000

The first election of Donald Trump sparked a series of "Rogue" romance anthologies that framed love as resistance, and the romance genre as progressive and inclusive. Looking back after a decade, how has the genre registered and responded to ongoing political contexts--in the United States and elsewhere--of political radicalization, xenophobia, natalism, revived eugenicist policies, the demonization of "gender ideology" and affirmative action, the redefinition and constriction of citizenship, transphobia, etc.?

Following conversations initiated at the IASPR 2025 Conference held in Mexico City, this edited collection seeks to address both the progressive and conservative aspects of the genre: its progressive and utopian side and also its embrace of conservative and reactionary trends, both in the texts themselves and in the publishing, distribution, and readership aspects of the romance genre world.

We welcome proposals that address these issues in North America, although we are especially keen to include submissions that challenge the cultural hegemony of the “Global North” from within and beyond its geographical borders.

- The political economy of publishing
- Censorship of (and in) popular romance
- Translational practices as political acts
- Counternarratives that challenge US master narratives (meritocracy, manifest destiny, American Dream, exceptionalism)
- Power and authoritarian masculinities and hegemonic femininities
- Neoliberalism and hetero/homo normativity
- Conspiracies and reactionaries
- Imagining the future in dark times
- Representations of politicians and government
- Biopolitics and corporeal politics
- Geopolitics, nationalism and patriotism
- Unequal couples: class, precarity and poverty
- Reader and author resistance (and compliance)
- Whiteness and racialisation
- Violence, social order and criminalization
- Defending BIPOC histories and archives
- Anticipatory obedience and civil disobedience

Please submit 250-word abstracts and a brief professional bio note to Nattie Golubov, ngolubov@unam.mx, Eric Selinger ESELINGE@depaul.edu and Charlotte Ireland, c.ireland@bham.ac.uk, by August 18, 2025.

The collection will be published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in collaboration with the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

New Publications: The Meaning of Life and Work; Sexuality; Race; Language; the Environment and More

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:36:00 +0000

I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:

In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:

For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)

And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.

AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone.

And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:

Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance Novels. Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025). “Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023).” REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]

Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels. PhD, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]

Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre. Honours Dissertation, Seattle Pacific University.

Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Hodson, Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism". New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters: 103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]

Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "The Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988." Contemporary Women's Writing 19. [Abstract available here and excerpts here.]

Kilian, G. Charles (2025). Gender, Genre, and Pleasure: Eroticism and Its Limits in French and Francophone Literature (1950–2010). PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [As noted in the RSDB, this may be of interest to romance scholars because of its attempts to define the differences between erotic literature, pornography and romance.]

Lancaster, Guy (2025). " ‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child." Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 56.1:25–36. [Details here.]

Nygren, Sandra (2025). Perfect imperfections: – en intersektionell fat studies-analys av tjocka flickprotagonister i young adult-romance. Masters, Linnéuniversitetet.

Penttinen, Sara (2025). Mind-Reading the Romance Novel: Effects of Single Perspective and Dual Perspective in Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners and Julie Olivia’s The Fiction Between Us. Master's in English Studies, University of Helsinki.

Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025). "Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors." Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]

Sutton, Denise H. (2025). “Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]

Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.

Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026

Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies. [More details here.]

Call for Papers: Northeast Popular Culture Association virtual conference

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:11:00 +0000

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION, Virtual, October 9 to October 11, 2025
AREA: ROMANCE/POPULAR ROMANCE FICTION

Deadline: Tuesday, July 15th by 5pm EST

Contact email: Wendy Wagner wwagner@jwu.edu

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2025 annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.

We are seeking paper proposals on the topic of Romance/Popular Romance Fiction for its annual conference.

We welcome a wide variety of papers related to romance and popular romance fiction. Possible approaches can include cultural studies, narrative analysis, issues of representation , production and dissemination of romance fiction, audience studies, the public uses of romance fiction/s, and more.

We are also interested in forming panels around some of the following topics:

· Romance and fanfiction – fandom as a training ground for developing romance writers

· The Romance industry and social media marketing

· Romance re-imagining itself – How does contemporary romance fiction take on and transform its own genre? How does it re-make the “pirate romance,” the “arranged marriage” trope, fairy tales and mythological re-tellings?

· Romance fiction in languages other than English

· Romance and disabilty

More information here.

New Publication: "Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction"

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:29:00 +0000

Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction

Edited by Josefine Smith and Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman

This edited volume explores multiple issues in romance fiction, based on survey data from real romance readers. An updated version of Janice Radway’s influential survey looking at romance readers in the early 1980s, this time scholars explore romance readers’ habits and attitudes in the twenty-first century. Each contributor in this volume uses the same survey data to make unique statements about gender, intersectionality, popular fiction, and popular culture. By using a common data set but approaching it from different perspectives, this unique volume is able to apply multiple methodologies to the same subject.

This was due in April from Rowman & Littlefield but I didn't see any information about it on Google Books so I assumed it had been delayed. It probably wasn't, because although there's still not a lot of information out about it, it has indeed been published.

The full abstract can be found on the publisher's website (Rowman & Littlefield has been taken over by Bloomsbury, so although it was published by R&L, the details are on the Bloomsbury site here).

Luckily Jonathan Allan has now received a copy and was able to send me images of the contents pages, so I'll include the titles of the articles below:

----

Jacqueline Burgess and Gaja Kolodziej - "Re-Reading Romance: Exploring Practitioner, Reader, and Industry Perceptions of the Genre"

Ayşegül Rigato - "From Private to Public: #Bookstagram as a Safe Space for Romance Readers"

Josefine Smith - "Romance Readers' Perceptions of New Adult Fiction"

Natalie Duvall and Matt Duvall - "Which Women Want What?: The Shifting Demographics and Perspectives of Romance Readers"

Jessica Caravaggio - "Social Media, Critical Analysis, and Feminist Action: Popular YA's Role in Disseminating Theory Online"

Joann Stout - "Beyond the Bodice Ripper: Why Erotic Romance is Feminist Literature" 93-110

Lise Shapiro Sanders - "Reading Historical Romance/Reading Romance Historically"

Anna Michelson - "Romance Reading as a Social Activity"

Andrea Barra - "Escaping the Negativity of "Escapism": Rethinking Romance Reader Notions of Why They Read"

Jessica M. W. Kratzer - "Love, Romance, Sex, and Happily Ever After: A Feminist Exploration of Women who Read Romance Novels"

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman - "Coming of Age and Coming Out: The Intersection of New Adult and Queer Romance"

Trinidad Linares - "Getting Love Out of the Margins: Race, Disability, Sexuality, and the Idea of a Happy After for Marginalized People"

Christina M. Babu - "Retellings and Re-readings - Romance, Representation, and Reimaginations in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (2022)"

Louise Schulmann-Darsy - "Mr. Darcy as the Perfect Book Boyfriend, or the Impact of BookTok on Male Characters in Romance Books"

Sara Partin and Josefine Smith - "Reading Romance and Erotic Literacy"

Arkansas Romance

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Sun, 25 May 2025 11:46:00 +0000

I recently received an email from Guy Lancaster who works for the Central Arkansas Library System:

I edit the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Among other things, I've been trying to ensure that we develop entries on any professionally published work of fiction set in Arkansas, including romance novels. You can find many of them just doing a search for the word "romance" on our site: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/?s=romance

I thought I'd share that with readers of the blog, in case some of you have a particular liking for/research interest in romances set in Arkansas.

CFP: Romantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Thu, 22 May 2025 09:02:00 +0000

CFP Edited Collection: Feral: Romantasy and Its Readers

Editors: Kacy Tillman, University of Tampa, kacytillman@gmail.com
Sarah Walden, Baylor University, Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu

Proposals Due: June 30, 2025

This will be a book-length, peer-reviewed volume, and we plan to market it as a trade publication with the University of Iowa Press. We are committed to diverse representations of texts and fan experiences, especially given that the genre is often criticized (rightly so) for centering white, cishet women. This collection will include chapters on queer romantasy, romantasy and disability, romantasy and book bans, romantasy and race, and more. This is a highly interdisciplinary collection, so we encourage a variety of approaches.

We are currently looking for chapters that explore any of the following topics:
● Representations of race and ethnicity in romantasy
● Romantasy reception and BIPOC booktok creators
● Adult readers of YA romantasy
● Romantasy and colonialism

Submission Guidelines: Please send the following to BOTH kacytillman@gmail.com and
Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu.
● Contact Information (name, email, phone, and preferred method of contact)
● Working title
● 200-word abstract
● Short professional bio
● Note on whether any of this research has been previously published

New Publications: Readers and Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Sat, 17 May 2025 12:41:00 +0000

Here's a list of the latest publications on romance which I've come across:

Cassady, Zoe A., Laura Crisp and Corrine M. Wickens, 2025. “Struggling in the Heartland: Romance Novels and Rural Adolescent Identity of Failure.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Online First. [Abstract here.]

Dahy, Faten Abdelaziz (2025). "Love-Bombing, Gaslighting, and Hoovering: A Psychological Study of Selected Romance Novels by Colleen Hoover." Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 6.3:56-75.

Rizkyane Machmuri, Alya, Yuyun Nurulaen & Pepen Priyawan (2025). "Romance Formula in Zoulfa Katouh’s Novel As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow." ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8.1: 224–234.

Rowe, Simone 2025. “The Map to Black Love: The Information Behaviours of Black Readers Seeking Romance Books With Black Character Representation”. The IJournal: Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 10 (2). Toronto, Canada: 107–120.

Swanson, Alexandra (2025). "“Bluebeard’s Castle”: Reconsidering Romance and Revenge in Netflix’s You". #MeToo TV: Essays on Streaming Rape Culture. Ed. Ralph Beliveau and Lisa Funnell. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 101-110. [Excerpt here. I had some concerns about the framing of this, which I discuss in the Romance Scholarship Database.]

Tristanty, Anggie Ayu Isra and Johny Alfian Khusyairi (2025). "Mass-produced romance: BookTok society and the homogenisation of literary culture." Jurnal Studi Komunikasi 9.1:249-260. [Details and some concerns about the works cited here.]

CFP: Conference Session Sponsored by the University of Tasmania

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Fri, 02 May 2025 10:59:00 +0000

ROMANCING ACADEMIA: PLACING ROMANCE

Friday 22 August 2025

Wrest Point, Tasmania

The concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies, driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia 2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry. In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are together often described by readers and writers using the spatial metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place (2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations – place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and scholarly engagement.

Proposed papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as ‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not limited to):

“Romancelandia” and its different characteristics
Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
Food as a metaphor for place
Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
The place of romance in public libraries

We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 16th May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.

More details here: https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2025-romance-writers-of-australia-conference/romancing-academia

CFP: Essay Collection on Laura Kinsale

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Vivanco) — Thu, 01 May 2025 13:17:00 +0000

From Alexandra Vasti:

Not One Word But True: Romance Authors and Scholars on Laura Kinsale

USA Today bestselling romance novelist and literature professor Alexandra Vasti is seeking abstract submissions for an edited collection of essays on New York Times bestselling romance novelist Laura Kinsale.

Over her thirty-year career as a RITA-award-winning writer of historical romance, Laura Kinsale produced twelve expansive and genre-defining novels. From the Medieval Hearts series with its extraordinary Middle English dialogue to the textual representation of receptive and expressive aphasia in Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s novels pushed at the edges of the romance genre both thematically and formally, challenging and upending its most familiar tropes for her devoted audience of millions of readers.

In this collection of essays, bestselling romance authors including Olivia Waite, Alexandra Vasti, and Freya Marske will reflect on Kinsale’s impact on the genre as a whole, as well as their own personal relationships with Kinsale’s work. From essays on metaphor, symbolism, and sentence construction to larger considerations of Kinsale’s immense global and chronological range, these authors will explore Kinsale’s work and contextualize her novels within the scope of romance currently being written and published.

In addition, scholars of romance are invited to consider Kinsale’s work from a critical lens. Her novels frequently include Orientalist stereotypes and villainous representations of queer men, even as she repeatedly challenges, undermines, and flips those tropes. Her complex portrayals of trauma and disability precede and precipitate conversations about those topics in the genre. And her own critical engagement with gender in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) is frequently reiterated and challenged by authors and readers today.

These collected essays will invite renewed consideration of one of the defining authors of the genre, aimed at new and long-time romance readers, creative writing students, and teachers and scholars of romance. We anticipate that the collection will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.

Interested essayists are invited to contribute essays on single or multiple books within Kinsale’s oeuvre. Topics might include:

Kinsale’s work in the context of 21st-century romance novels
War and trauma
Orientalism
Gender and gender performance
Sexuality, particularly representations of queer characters
Sex, kink, and power
Disability
Language use, especially her use of vernaculars, accents, and Middle English
Genre

At this stage, interested scholars are invited to submit a title, abstract, and brief bio for consideration. Once the book proposal is accepted, final dates for the essay submission (4000-8000 words) will be set.

Please send materials to Alexandra Vasti at alex@alexandravasti.com by May 31, 2025.