2023 Conference Schedule: Romance Revitalised

International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Posted on by

***Below is the schedule for the upcoming IASPR Conference (Birmingham, UK, 28-30 June, 2023).***

Wednesday, June 28

8.30am – 9:00am, Wednesday, June 28
Registration and Welcome

9:00am – 10:30am, Wednesday, June 28
Session 1A: BookTok and publishing

Chels Upton: Screaming, Crying, Throwing Up: BookTok and the Romance Industry.

Katie Morrissey: #QueerBookTok’s Reading Networks: Who gets to read and write LGBTQ+ Romance?

Lucy Rouse: “Our Queen, Colleen”: Exploring Affect, Reading Communities, and the Power of BookTok in Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us Duology.

Session 1B: Fandom

Andrea Anne Trinidad: Ship Has Not Sunk, Romance is Not Dead: ‘Clowning’ as the Fandom’s Mode to Revitalizing Romance.

Lucy Sheerman: Queer readings of Jane Eyre.

Emily Mohabir: A Love Enshrined in Time: Material Culture’s Role in Nostalgic Romance in Netflix/tvN’s Twenty-Five, Twenty-One and its Impact on Creative Digital Fan Cultures.

10:30am – 11:00am, Wednesday, June 28
Break

11:00am-12:30pm, Wednesday, June 28
Session 2A: Black Romance in Britain and America 1

Julie Moody-Freeman: Vivian Stephens, American Romance, and Institution Building.

Justina Clayburn: The Own Voices Social Media Project: Teaching Diverse Romance Novels in a Gen Ed Literature and Popular Culture Course.

Jeania Ree Moore: Beverly Jenkins as a Contemporary Chronicler – Black Historical Romance and the Religious Work of Black History.

Session 2B: The contemporaneity of Jane Austen: the ongoing subversion of canons and ideologies in Romance writing

Anne Besnault: Writing With and Against Romance: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Myriam Boussahba: After Jane Austen: “Regency” Romance Today.

Florence Cabaret: Transnationalising Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

12:30pm – 1:30pm, Wednesday, June 28
Lunch

1:30pm-2:45pm, Wednesday, June 28
Keynote Address: Huike Wen

2:45pm-3:05pm, Wednesday, June 28
Break

3:05pm-4:35pm, Wednesday, June 28
Session 3A: Paranormal Romance

Evvie Valiou: Death and the posthuman/ posthumous female body in paranormal romance.

Sanjana Basker: Monster Romance: Potential, Pitfalls, and New Materialist Feminism.

Maria Ramos-Garcia: Metafiction in the My So-Called Mystical Midlife series (2021-2022) by Robyn Peterman.

Session 3B: Narrative and Genre

Nattie Golubov: Practices of attachment: the pleasures of rereading popular romance fiction.

Katie Deane: Autographic transfocalization in the romance: the case of Midnight Sun.

Francesca Pierini: Imploding fireworks: Love and self-knowledge in the contemporary Italian sentimental novel.

4:35pm-4:45pm, Wednesday, June 28
Break

4:45pm-6:15pm, Wednesday, June 28
Session 4A: Young Adult Romance

Carly Bennett: Mattering and Belonging Across 30 Years of Sapphic Young Adult Romance.

Sreepurna Datta: “You look cool in that outfit”: Clothing and identity in Indian American teen romances.

Inmaculada Perez-Casal: The YA romance as a tool for social transformation: the case of Ismée Williams’ This Train is Being Held.

Session 4B: Reading and Writing Romance

Benjamin Hanckel & Vassiliki Veros: Love and Romance in the City: An examination of cultural texts in public library displays during celebrations of love in London and Sydney.

Maria Isabel Gonzalez-Cruz: ‘Words, words, words’: The role of foreign languages in romance novels.

Andrea Martucci: Bad Romance Data: Contextualizing the Popular Romance Fiction Market.

6:30pm
Reception and Book Launch, sponsored by the Popular and Genre Research Network

Thursday, June 29

 8.45am – 9:15am, Thursday, June 29
Registration

9:15am-10:45am, Thursday, June 29
Session 5A: Black Romance in Britain and America 2

Rita Dandridge: Rapping Black Romance: Sex and Empowerment.

Jayashree Kamblé: Black Love, Society, and Subject Status in Britain: Dell’s Entwined Destinies (1980) as a Milestone in Category Romance.

Irene Perez-Fernandez: Black British Love Matters: Revitalising Contemporary Romantic Narratives.

Session 5B: Queer Romance

Lucy Hargrave: The female gaze on the body in queer romance novels.

Elin Abrahamsson: Skewed femininity in Simona Ahrnstedt’s Allt eller inget.

Michael Gratzke: Where does the love go? Representations of romance and relationships in current life-writing by trans men, transmasculine and butch people.

10:45am – 11:15am, Thursday, June 29
Break

11:15am-12:45pm, Thursday, June 29
Session 6A: Love Studies and Romance

Eric Selinger: A Heart Needs a Home: Ontological Rootedness, Simon May, and Popular Romance Studies.

Meghna Bohidar: Who Has the Right to Write the City: Understanding the Transgressive Potential of Public Romance in India.

Lebohang Masango: The Soft Life: A Political Economy of Love among Young Women in South Africa,

Session 6B: Form and trope

Joseph Crawford: Waifus, Husbandos, and Lesbian Wizards: Otome games, visual novels, and digital romance media cultures.

Gaja Kolodziej: Unforgettably in Love: Uses of the Amnesia Trope in Contemporary Romance.

Louise Schulmann-Darsy: Possessiveness of hockey players through their jersey number in erotic romance books.

12:45pm – 1:45pm, Thursday, June 29
Lunch

1:45pm-3:00pm, Thursday, June 29
Keynote Address: The Birmingham Romance Research Group

3:00pm-3:20pm, Thursday, June 29
Break

3:20pm-4:50pm, Thursday, June 29
Session 7A: Romance Bodies

Cristina Cruz Gutierrez: “Skinny Is the New Fat”: Traditional and Modern Nigerian Beauty in Skinny Girl in Transit.

Paloma Fresno Calleja: Reading “Plus Size” Romantic Narratives Intersectionally: Lani Young’s Scarlet Series.

Ellen Carter: Analysing contemporary romance covers to uncover readers’ desires.

Session 7B: m/m Romance

Kristin Noone: “He looked like the kind of country youth they wrote ballads about”: Queer Robin Hood Romance in K.J. Charles’ The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting.

Lucy Neville: ‘Gaypropriation?’: Gay and bisexual men’s perspectives on women who produce and consume m/m sexually explicit texts.

Monika Marketa Smidova: Folklore, Trauma, and Healing in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles.

4:50pm-5.00pm, Thursday, June 29
Break

5:00pm-6:00pm, Thursday, June 29
Teaching Popular Romance Fiction: a Roundtable

7:00pm
Conference Dinner

Friday, June 30

8:45am – 9:15am, Friday, June 30
Registration

9:15am – 10:45am, Friday, June 30
Session 8A: Erotics of Romance

Heather Schell: Reverse Harem Romance: Power and the Shift in Women’s Erotic Imagination.

Athena Bellas & Jodi McAlister: Let Me Take Care of You: Romanticised Domestic Fantasy in Audio Erotica.

Nicola Welsh-Burke: The Sacred and the Profane: Romance, Sexuality and ‘Girlboss Cannibalism’.

Session 8B: Is This the Real Life, or Is This Just Fantasy? Strange, Familiar Romance

Matt Hayler: Weirdly Romantic: Compersion, Relationship Anarchy, and the Beautiful Weird.

Veera Makela: Romance Regency of Regency Romance.

Esko Suoranta: Domestic Love in 21st-Century Speculative Fiction.

10:45am – 11:00am, Friday, June 30
Break

11: 15am – 1:05pm, Friday, June 30
Session 9A: Perspectives on Historical Romance 1

Javaria Farooqui: Reading Historical Popular Romance in 21st-Century Pakistan.

Sarah Ficke: Fictional Technology Meets Real History in Jeannie Lin’s ‘Gunpowder Chronicles’.

Fang-Mei Lin: Is It or Isn’t It Romantic? A Case Study of a Gothic Romance Film in Taiwan.

Hsu-Ming Teo: The Australian Convict Prostitute Romance: Narrating Social and Sexual Justice for “Damned Whores”.

Session 9B: Feminism and politics in romance

Maria Butler: Pro-choice activism in Marian Keyes Watermelon.

Rosalind Haslett: Mammy Walsh’s Daughters: Irish feminism and the novels of Marian Keyes.

Mariana Ripoll-Fonollar: Suffragette Historical Romances: Re-Purposing Women’s Suffrage in a Postfeminist Context.

Hannah Scupham: The Homefront of “The War on Christmas”: Great American Family’s Holiday Romance Films, Domesticity, and the Rise of Christo-Fascism.

1:05pm – 2:00pm, Friday, June 30
Lunch

2:00pm – 3:15pm, Friday, June 30
Session 10A: Teaching Popular Romance Fiction: A Workshop

Session 10B: Love Across the Atlantic: A Roundtable

3:15pm – 3:30pm, Friday, June 30
Break

3:30pm – 5:00pm, Friday, June 30
Session 11A: Perspectives on Historical Romance 2

Emma Kearney: A Romantic History of Newgate Prison: Theories of Punishment in Historical Romance, 1977 to Present.

Johanna Hoorenman: “The opportunities that Harriette Wilson wast’d:” L.A. Hall’s ‘The Comfortable Courtesan’, women’s culture, and Regency romance.

Bonnie J White: “Too Much Love, Not Enough Men: The Excess of Women in Carola Dunn’s Superfluous Women”

Session 11B: Heroes

Jonathan Allan: Heroes and the Procreative Realm.

Emma McNamara: Tired/ Wired: The Byronic Hero Becomes Nice.

Veronika Vargova: “What will you do with yourself when you grasp that your mind is only different, not deranged?”: Isolation, Madness, and Neurodivergent Heroes in Historical Romance Novels.

5:00pm, Friday, June 30
Farewell

Call for Proposals: IASPR Conference 2023

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The ninth annual international conference on popular romance studies:

Romance Revitalised
Birmingham, UK, June 28-30 2023

Proposal deadline: December 31, 2022

This will be the first meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance in five years. In this time, the world has changed significantly: how we live, and, as a result, how we love.

In the spirit of renewal, the theme for the 2023 IASPR conference is a broad one. We are open to proposals for papers, posters and panels on anything to do with the popular culture of romantic love, now and in the past, from any discipline, from anywhere in the world.

Popular Romance Studies is an interdisciplinary field, including (but not limited to) scholars from literary studies; film, television, and media studies; communication and the social sciences; critical race, feminist, queer and disability studies; audience & fan studies, etc. All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including talks, panels, and workshops on professional development, international collaboration, and pedagogy. Content creators, writers, and professionals from various romance industries are invited to submit proposals as well.

Submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words, to conferences@iaspr.org by December 31, 2022. Please specify whether you are proposing a paper, workshop, or poster. Panel submissions (3-4 related papers) are welcome.

We are currently investigating the possibility of a hybrid conference. Please indicate whether you would be interested in this option.

If you do not have a permanent academic job at a university (eg. a PhD student, contingent staff, an independent researcher), or are an untenured Assistant Professor, you may be eligible for the Kathleen Seidel Travel Grant. Please note if you wish to receive more information about this opportunity.

Call for proposals! Popular Romance Studies at PCA 2023

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The Popular Culture Association’s annual conference is divided into sub-areas representing different areas of scholarship. The Romance Area of PCA has become a regular gathering point for many emerging and established popular romance scholars. 

Romance Area Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
April 5-8 2023 – San Antonio, TX

Body Politic/Body Politics

The body politic (n.): A nation regarded as a corporate entity; (with the) the state. (OED)

Body politics (n): 1. The intersection of state interest with the bodies of its subjects (esp. marginalized subjects); state attempts to regulate those bodies. 2. The study of the ways in which marginalized bodies are a subject of state interest.

The twentieth-century Western romance narrative involved a fertile, able-bodied, cis-gendered heterosexual couple committing to a permanent heteronormative reproductive partnership sanctioned by church and state. This normative expectation was seldom questioned. As Waylen et al. have noted, “Seemingly personal issues associated with the body—such as rape, contraception, hair and clothing styles, pregnancy, or sexual harassment—were not traditionally seen as ‘political’”
(Waylen et al., 2013). Such “personal” issues have long been central to romance narratives.

Since the 1970s, this consensus view of romantic love has eroded, and romantic popular culture is now less univocal in its depictions of body politics. Can a “good” heroine have sex out of wedlock? With someone she doesn’t plan to marry? Can she use birth control? Can she find happiness if she isn’t white, or straight, or monogamous, or able-bodied, or cis-gendered? What kinds of authority do protagonists have over their own bodies? What types of state intervention must they submit to or fight? The diversity of opinion showcased in today’s romantic narratives makes it more challenging for readers to ignore the body politics in a book. In fact, one could argue that choosing a subgenre (such as inspirational romance or erotica) is already an expression of a reader’s body politics.

As Romance Area chairs preparing for our PCA meeting in San Antonio, Texas, body politics is on our minds. Texas is at the forefront of rolling back abortion rights as the country wrestles with the rollback of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade case (which also originated in Texas). But Texas is only one piece of the bigger picture. Elsewhere, state legislatures are fighting over the rights of people with non-conforming gender or sexual identities. The entire nation is and always has been embroiled in body politics, from the forceable relocation of Indigenous Americans, the enslavement of African-Americans, and decades on intense government oversight of where, how, and if BIPOC people were allowed to live, reproduce, attend school, shop, enjoy leisure time, and enjoy state-sanctioned romantic relationships. All of these seemingly private choices lie at the very heart of the romance narrative.

The theme of the PCA Romance area in 2023 is the body politic/body politics in romance and romantic media. We encourage you to define this theme broadly, and to think not just about specific texts but also about their authors, writers, and publishers, to understand the broader discussions in which these texts are implicated. How can we most productively think through the entanglements of bodies and politics?

Possible topics on this theme could include: Continue reading →

Openings at IASPR and JPRS!

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International Association for the Study of Popular Romance: Secretary

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking a Secretary to join our Executive Committee. This is a volunteer position, with a two-year term.

IASPR is a thirteen-year old scholarly association dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love. IASPR is committed to building a strong community of scholars of popular romance through open, digital access to all scholarly work published by the Association, by organizing or sponsoring an annual international conference on popular romance studies, and by encouraging the teaching of popular romance at all levels of higher education.

The formal duties of IASPR Secretary include scheduling and setting the agendas for our monthly Executive Committee meetings, taking minutes at those meetings, managing our organizational document / materials database, and monitoring our contact@iaspr.org email address to forward inquiries as needed. The Secretary is part of every policy discussion and decision made by the Executive Committee and, as has happened with other positions, the job will evolve to suit your interests and skills.

If you would like to apply for this position, please send an email about your interest to Jayashree Kamblé at president@iaspr.org.

 

Journal of Popular Romance Studies: Film and Television Editor

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is seeking a Film and Television editor to join their editorial team. This is a volunteer position.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is an interdisciplinary journal publishing contributions on the study of popular romance media. We also publish book reviews, notes and queries, special issues, and reports from the classroom that outline techniques and tools, syllabus models, and practical pieces on the teaching of popular romance media and culture.

Click here to read more about this position.

IASPR Sponsored Event: Black Romance Masterclass led by Margo Hendricks on Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo

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DePaul’s Center for Black Diaspora is continuing their exciting series of events on Black Romance. Co-sponsored by IASPR, this exciting virtual event will be of interest to IASPR members, popular romance scholars, and popular romance audiences.

Black Romance Master Class Led by: Dr. Margot Hendricks, February 26, 2022, 10am - 12pm CST.

The aim of this master class is to offer a pedagogical and scholarly approach to reading and teaching Black Romance fiction, specifically, historical Black romance novels. What this class will offer is a model, using Indigo as the class text, for teaching the literariness of novel, its continuity with the history of the romance genre, and the importance of reassessing the teaching of and writing about Black romance, and the romance genre in general. What the course will offer Black romance readers, scholars, and teachers is a critical approach easily adapted to anti-racist pedagogy and scholarly writing about romance.

This online event will take place on: 
February 26, 2022
10 am – 12 pm CST. 

Register to attend here on Eventbrite. 

Sponsored by the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

CFP: Romancing Africa

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New at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies: Special Issue Call for Papers

Romancing Africa: Manifestations of Popular Romance in Africa

Editors: Lynda Gichanda Spencer and Martina Vitackova

In February 2016, the New York Times published “A Valentine’s Day Reading List” that did not include any character, love story or book from Africa. In response, Grace A. Musila took to social media where she started #LoveinLiteraryAfrica, ‘a protest against this oh-so-familiar tradition’. Musila’s tweet received a remarkable response from the “African literati” who immediately began to share their favourite love stories from Africa. Five years later, in February 2021, Kiru Taye, one of the founding editors of Romance Writers of West Africa, was named as one of USA Today’s Bestselling Authors: a clear demonstration that there are African authors writing within the romance genre, and a sign that it is time—indeed, past time—for scholarship on popular romance fiction to address the thriving worlds of popular romance in Africa.

Romance imprints abound on the continent, including Sapphire Books, Nollybooks, the imprints of NB Publishers and Romanza from South Africa, Drumbeats from Kenya, Adoras from Cote d’Ivoire, Littattafan Soyayya, Ankara Press, Ebonystory and Love Africa Press from Nigeria. Scholarship on African romance remains marginal, in relation to studies of western romance, but this scholarship does exist, including a foundational essay by Lydie Moudileno on “The troubling popularity of West African romance novels” in Research in African Literatures (2008), a special issue of the South African feminist journal Agenda on “Gender and Popular Imaginaries in Africa” (October 2018), a special issue of Feminist Theory on ‘Chick-Lit in a Time of African Cosmopolitanism’ (April 2019), and a forthcoming special issue on popular romance written in Afrikaans for the digital journal Stilet. This special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies therefore aims both to bring together scholars doing research on popular romance in Africa and to introduce existing research on the genre at the African continent to popular romance academia.

If, as Moudileno argues, the local creativity involved in “Africanizing the romance” allows romance readers and writers to manipulate structures and produce new meanings that are linked to the experience of the postcolony, thus opening up ‘the potentialities of an overtly marginal literary genre’ (2008:128), our hope for this issue is to Africanize popular romance scholarship. We are therefore interested in essays about all aspects of popular romance writing in Africa: its writers, readers, publishing houses, and scholars. We want to map the dynamics of popular romance genre in Africa and investigate these in their specificity and/or comparability with popular romance from other geopolitical areas. We seek to explore how popular romance shapes Africa, and how Africa shapes popular romance. What does the production and consumption of popular romance reveal about contemporary Africa?

We are open to submissions from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to: cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, publishing studies, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political science, law, and music. Since this is an electronic publication, we also welcome multimedia and artwork contributions documenting the world of popular romance in, on, and about the African continent. We welcome articles discussing works by authors on the African continent as well as African authors in the diaspora. We seek submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Popular romance publishing industries on the African continent
  • Self-publishing and other alternative forms of text circulation in Africa or by African authors
  • Interrogating femininity, masculinity, sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity and religion
  • The pleasures of erotic desire
  • Subversion, alternatives and alterations to the (Western) romance formula
  • Social engagement and social critique in African popular romance
  • Interviews with romance authors from Africa
  • Analysing the culture of reading clubs and reading groups in Africa

 

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is published by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR). It is the first academic journal to focus exclusively on representations of romantic love across national and disciplinary boundaries. It is an Open Access, double-blind peer reviewed journal, and is available at http://jprstudies.org/. JPRS is currently listed at ERIH Plus (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences), and in the process of listing in a range of databases, including Sherpa Romeo, DOAJ, Scopus (Elsevier), ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), and Ulrichsweb (ProQuest). It is probable that JPRS will be listed for all of these by the time the special issue is published.

Please submit expressions of interest by 30 September 2021. Feel free to contact the editors of this special issue to discuss possible topics: Lynda Gichanda Spencer (l.spencer@ru.ac.za) or Martina Vitackova (martina.vitackova@ugent.be). Full articles of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, will be due by 1 March 2022. We are aiming for publication at the end of 2022. Manuscripts can be sent to the following address:  special.issues@jprstudies.org. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA eighth edition format. Please remove all identifying material (i.e. running heads with the author’s name) so that submissions can easily be sent out for anonymous peer review. Suggestions for appropriate peer reviewers are welcome. For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions.

 

Works cited

Newell, Stephanie. Ghanaian Popular Fiction: Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal life and other Tales. James Currey: Oxford, 2000.

Moudileno, Lydie. “The troubling popularity of West African romance novels”. Research in African Literatures, 39.4 (2008): 120-132.

 

 

Eighth Annual IASPR Conference Postponed to Summer 2021

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With a heavy heart, IASPR is announcing that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Eighth International Conference on Popular Romance Studies will not take place this summer. Given the uncertainty of international travel in the short term and the exigencies of academic schedules in the fall and winter, our plan is to postpone the conference until the summer of 2021, with the University of La Palmas Gran Canaria (ULPGC) remaining our host.

All papers and posters accepted for the 2020 conference will remain accepted for 2021. We hope you will be able to join us. We will also reopen the CFP in order to accommodate participants whose research evolves in the interim, rendering their original proposals out of date, and to reach out to scholars who were unable to participate this year. We will be in touch later in the year so there is no need to let us know your intentions at this stage.

If you are in receipt of a travel grant this will be honored for the 2021 conference, providing: 1) you attend IASPR-21 and; 2) your paper proposal remains substantially similar or, if changed, still fits the conference theme.  

Although we cannot meet in person this summer, it is possible that IASPR / JPRS could host some kind of digital showcase this summer or fall: not an online conference, but perhaps some kind of webinar or twitter session, an online presentation of posters at the IASPR website, or some other way to circulate research and exchange ideas.

Our decision about whether to pursue this option will depend on several variables, including how many of the planned 2020 conference attendees want to participate and how many have the time and expertise to help with the planning and execution. We are currently polling the 2020 conference participants, and will announce any decisions on this when the results are in.

JPRS Seeks Managing Editor

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The Journal of Popular Romance Studies, an international peer-reviewed academic journal publishing scholarship on popular romance fiction and on the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture, is seeking a new Managing Editor, to begin work no later than September 1, 2020. (A summer start would be ideal, in order to smooth the transition.)

Duties include:

  • managing the journal’s main email account
  • coordinating the submission, review and publication procedures of papers submitted to the journal
  • working closely with the Executive Editor in the daily management and further development of the Journal.

The ideal candidate has a PhD (in any field; late stage doctoral students will also be considered), knows the field of popular romance studies, and/or has an interest in academic publishing. We are looking for someone who is flexible, enthusiastic, and discreet, since the Managing Editor will be in possession of confidential information about the status of manuscripts, the names of peer reviewers, etc.

This is a volunteer position – there is no salary connected to it. However, it affords ample opportunity to develop transferable skills, gain experience in publishing, network with scholars around the world, and contribute to the further institutional and scholarly recognition of the field of popular romance studies.

If you are interested, please send a letter of motivation and a brief CV to Eric Selinger (Executive Editor) and Erin Young (Managing Editor) at managing.editor@jprstudies.org no later than June 1, 2020. Questions may also be sent to this address.

IASPR Statement on the Romance Writers of America

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For over a decade, the Romance Writers of America has been a generous sponsor of IASPR. Every conference we have held has received RWA support, including our upcoming 2020 conference on “Diversity, Inclusion, Innovation” in popular romance culture, and the field of popular romance studies has been seeded and sustained by the RWA Academic Research Grant program.

However, in light of recent events we as a scholarly organization must add our voice to the chorus of readers, reviewers, editors, agents, and authors who have called for sweeping and lasting change at the RWA, beginning with the eight steps listed in the “Readers to RWA” letter from Romance Sparks Joy:

  • A clear, unequivocal statement that RWA is anti-racist and that all of its policies, procedures, and activities will ensure that the organization meets this standard.
  • A public apology to Ms. Milan, the Board members who have been compelled by their consciences to resign this week, and members who have been harmed by the RWA as stated above.
  • The resignations of President/President-Elect Damon Suede and Executive Director Carol Ritter.
  • An emergency election of new Directors to replace those who have resigned in protest.
  • A full, transparent, and independent investigation into the complaint, investigation, and censure processes around RWA’s Code of Ethics, with attention to events related to the complaints against Ms. Milan and reports that ethics complaints by marginalized members were not forwarded to the Ethics Committee by RWA staff.
  • An accounting of the actions that led to the creation of a secret ethics committee and the Board’s initial vote against Ms. Milan.
  • The removal of staff if investigations demonstrate those staff members discriminated against marginalized authors based on their identities, whether intentionally or through negligence.
  • An Action Plan developed with public input to address the systematic exclusion, harassment, and lack of support for marginalized members and prospective members at every level of RWA, including chapters, conferences and events, staff prerogatives, and Board action.

In keeping with that letter’s call for a “boycott of any events sponsored by or affiliated with the national chapter of RWA,” and in order to forestall any use of our conference to whitewash problems with diversity and inclusion at RWA itself, we will budget for, plan, and, if necessary, hold our 2020 conference this summer without using the financial support that RWA has provided for it. We will reallocate resources and seek out other funding in order to minimize the impact of this decision on travel support for graduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars.

We do not flatter ourselves that IASPR, our conferences, and our affiliate publication, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies are somehow free from racism, exclusion, and inequity, or that we will always succeed in addressing them. We do, however, hope to respond to our failures by keeping in mind the advice that Prof. Jay Thalang gives his graduate students—and, ultimately, takes to heart—in Courtney Milan’s Hold Me:

“If you can’t get over your ego and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four times as long. You failed. Get used to it. Some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs came about because someone failed and figured out why. Don’t worry about failing. Worry about failing wrongly.”

So far in this matter RWA has not just failed, but failed wrongly. We ask for better from them, and will try to do better ourselves. We hope all organizations, including RWA, are able to embrace policy and practice that sees and represents all of their talent.