Conference Calls for Papers in Popular Romance Studies

SarahFPublishing News4 Comments

There are a number of exciting opportunities out there if you’re academically involved in Popular Romance Studies:

Romance area of the Popular Culture Association conference in St. Louis, MO, March 31-April 3, 2010.
PCA is a fabulous conference to test out new ideas and start to be a part of the new and exciting field of Popular Romance Studies. We’re a lot of fun, very open and inviting and inclusive, and we’re specifically expanding this year beyond Popular Romance Fiction to Popular Romance Studies writ large. From the Call For Papers:

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen-‘large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

Contact me with questions or proposals.
Deadline: November 30, 2009

IASPR conference in Belgium, August 5-7, 2010.
This is the second annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Our first annual conference in Brisbane, Australia, was a great success, and Belgium looks to be even better. Our keynote speakers are Pamela Regis, Lynne Pearce, and Celestina Deleyto, a critic of romantic comedy films.

This conference has three main goals:

• To bring to bear contemporary critical theory on the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from all national and cultural traditions
• To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of popular romance, by documenting and/or theorizing what happens to tropes and texts as they move across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries
• To explore the relationships between popular romance tropes and texts as they circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film, or from song to music video), between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers

Contact conference organizers with questions or proposals. (We might have some travel funds to distribute. Maybe. If we’re lucky.)
Deadline: January 1, 2010

Soon, very soon, we’ll have two calls for articles, rather than conference presentations, one for a special issue of the Journal of American Culture, and one for a volume that is in response to/grows from the Princeton Conference. I’ll post those when available.

Please feel free to post these CFPs far and wide, far beyond popular romance fiction. We’d love to have lots of fabulous papers for PCA and Belgium about all sorts of different representations of popular romance, across many disciplines.

SarahF

Sarah F. is a literary critic, a college professor, and an avid reader of romance -- and is thrilled that these are no longer mutually exclusive. Her academic specialization is Romantic-era British women novelists, especially Jane Austen, but she is contributing to the exciting re-visioning of academic criticism of popular romance fiction. Sarah is a contributor to the academic blog about romance, Teach Me Tonight, the winner of the 2008-2009 RWA Academic Research Grant, and the founder and President of the International Association of the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR). Sarah mainly reviews BDSM romance and gay male romance and hopes to be able to beat her TBR pile into submission when she has time to think. Sarah teaches at Fayetteville State University, NC.

→ SarahF