York Conference Schedule
Thursday, September 27
8:00am – 9:00am, Thursday, September 27
Registration
8:30am – 9:00am, Thursday, September 27
Introduction and Welcome
9:00am – 10:30am, Thursday, September 27
Session 1: Romancing Sex, Kink, and Rape
Lucy Brown (University of Sheffield, UK): Romancing the ‘Sexual Revolution’ in Mills & Boon novels, 1960s-1970s
Cecilia Tan (Independent Scholar, USA): Don’t Panic: Empowerment through Sexual Submission in BDSM Romance Novels (and real life)
Sarah S. G. Frantz (Fayetteville State University, USA): “Strange Stirrings”: Feminism, Rape, and Sexual Awakening
in the 1970s Blockbuster Historical Romance
10:30am – 12:00pm, Thursday, September 27
Session 2: Male Bodies / Female Desires
Emily Roach (Roehampton University, UK): Queer Pleasure, Pornography and Romance in Participatory Culture: Slashing and Shipping the “Boy Who Lived”
KT Torrey (Virginia Tech, USA): The [Little] Death of the Author: Producing Pleasure in Supernatural Slash Fic
Anna Malinowska (University of Silesia, Poland): Monstrously Romantic. Love in the Time of Popular Culture
12:00pm – 1:00pm, Thursday, September 27
LUNCH
1:00pm – 2:30pm, Thursday, September 27
Session 3: Reading the RomCom: Europe, the US, and India
Betty Kaklamanidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece): Pleasure and Spectatorship: A Bi-National Ethnographic Study of the Hollywood Romantic Comedy
Nick Redfern (Independent Scholar, UK): The romance film at the box office in five European countries, 2006 to 2010
Katherine Farrimond (Newcastle University, UK): “John Hughes Did Not Direct My Life”: Romantic Comedy, (Post)Feminism and the Sexual Politics of Virginity in Easy A
2:30pm – 3:30pm, Thursday, September 27
Keynote Address: John Storey (University of Sunderland, UK): Love’s Best Habit: The Uses of Media in Romantic Relationships
This paper critically examines how people use media when in romantic relationships: the use of media discourses and the use of media technologies. The main findings are based on analysis of forty-two discursive questionnaires and fourteen semi-structured interviews consisting of almost twenty hours of recorded material.
3:30pm – 4:00pm, Thursday, September 27
BREAK
4:00pm – 5:00pm, Thursday, September 27
Special Session: Jane Lovering, “The Pleasures of Romance”
Jane Lovering recently won the Romantic Novel of the Year 2012, awarded by the Romantic Novelist’s Association, for her book Please Don’t Stop the Music. Please Don’t Stop the Music has also been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance.
Friday, September 28
8:00am – 8:30am, Friday, September 28
Registration
8:30am – 10:00am, Friday, September 28
Session 4: North / South, East / West: Romance Across the Boundaries
Heather Schell (George Washington University, USA): Turkish Delight: The Appeal of Western Category Romance in the Middle East
İrem Yerlikaya (Harlequin Publishing, Turkey): The Appeal of the Erotic in Romance Novels in a Patriarchal Culture
10:30am – 12:00pm, Friday, September 28
Session 5: Concurrent Panels
Session 5A: Local Heroes, Heroines, and Pleasures: Popular Romance in Algeria, India, and Albania
Khadija Belfarhi (Annaba University, Algeria): Oral Formulaic Romantic Poetry in 19th C Algerian Literature
Ancy Bay P C (University of Hyderabad, India): At the End of the Story; Pleasure, Morale and Confessions: Early Popular-Fictions and the Readership in Malayalam
Artur Hadaj (Irana University, Albania): Lust vs Doctored Love in Albanian Songs
Session 5B: Transforming Pleasure: Repetition, Emulation, and Appropriation
Brittany Cavallaro (University of Wisconsin, USA): Chick Lit by Design: Intersections of Marketing and Gender in the Current Publishing Climate
Katie Morrissey (University of Wisconsin, USA): Fifty Shades of Remix: The Shared Pleasures of Commercial and Fan Romances
Bridget Kies (University of Wisconsin, USA): First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage: The Pleasure in Normalizing the Subversive
12:00pm – 1:00pm, Friday, September 28
LUNCH
1:00pm – 2:30pm, Friday, September 28
Session 6: Concurrent Panels
Session 6A: Africa and the Black Diaspora: Empire, Sex, and the Post-Colonial Remix
Sarah Ficke (Marymount University, USA): Happily Ever After in a Time of Empire: The Problem of Pleasure in Rupert Gray
Julie Moody-Freeman (DePaul University, USA): Race, Responsibility, and Pleasure in the Romance Novel
Muff Anderson (University of South Africa): How to Recognize a villianness: engaging archetypes and spotting soap-operators in Ghanian tales of true romance, obsession, and unrequited love
Session 6B: Faerie Gang Bangs and Werewolf LTRs Paranormal Romances as Narrative Spaces for Considering Gender and Sexual Roles
Julia Voss (The Ohio State University, USA): Submitting to Love?: Renegotiating the “Career Woman” Trope in Paranormal Romance
Tiffany Salter (The Ohio State University, USA): Slave to Calculation or Slave to Sensation?: The Paranormal Romance Heroine as Cold Rationalist and Sultry Voluptuary
Sarah Maitland (University of Rhode Island, USA): Tied Up and Twisted: Male-centric Eroticized Violence in Paranormal Romance
2:30pm – 4:00pm, Friday, September 28
Session 7: Concurrent Panels
Session 7A: Readers, Reviewers, and the Pleasures of Resistance
Jessica Matthews (George Mason University, USA): The Pleasure of Hating a Scene: Undecidability and the Beating Scene in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander
Barbra Churchill (University of Alberta, Canada): “Prettily stamping her foot”: Popular Romance and the Pleasures of Evasion and Resistance
Chryssa Sharp (Lindenwood University, USA): Pleasure in the Awful: Consumer Behaviour, Social Media and the Schadenfreude of Bad Reviews
Session 7B: The Allures of Romance: Text, Paratext, and Real Life Love
Maria Ramos-Garcia (South Dakota State University): Looking for “Something More”: Love, Sex and Female Pleasure in the Twenty-First Century Paranormal Romance
Regina Künne (TU Branschweig, Germany): Enhancing the Pleasure of Reading Romances
Natalie Poole (University of Alabama, USA): From “Once upon a time..” to “..happily ever after,” and everything in between: the story of Romance as a Cultural Narrative depicted in real-life stories of “How we met”
4:00pm – 4:30pm, Friday, September 28:
BREAK
4:30pm – 5:30pm, Friday, September 28
Special Guest: Jenny Haddon (RNA): Romantic Fiction in the UK: 50 Years of Constancy and Change
7:00pm – 10:00pm, Friday September 28
CONFERENCE DINNER (Separate Registration to come)
Saturday, September 29
9:00am – 9:30am, Saturday, September 29
Registration
9:30am – 11:00am, Saturday, September 29
Session 8: Scandal! Abduction! Race! Convention and Transformation in Popular Romance
Amy Burge (University of York, UK): Cherishing the Chains of their Bondage: Reworking Abduction in Medieval and Modern English Romance
Adam Tang (Independent Scholar, Taiwan): Pleasures of Scandal in Popular Romance: Dancing with Society, from Compromise to a Revolution of the Norm
Rita B. Dandridge (Virginia State University, USA): Sexual Pleasure and Christian Ethics in Beverly Jenkins’ Night Song and Night Hawk
11:00am – 12:30pm, Saturday, September 29
Session 9: Problem Texts and New Approaches: Disaggregating “the Romance”
Lu (Sally) Jin (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China): Pleasures of Popular Romance and Problem Romance: Lamia in the East and West
Ria Cheyne (Liverpool Hope University, UK): Happily Ever After? Disability and Cure in Popular Romance Novels
Eric Selinger (DePaul University): Breaking Into Song: Hull, Heyer, Shafak, James, and the Poetries of Popular Romance
12:30pm — 1:30pm, Saturday, September 29:
LUNCH
1:30pm – 3:00pm, Saturday, September 29
Session 10: Romancing Material Culture: Wedding Dresses, “Bella Bedding,” and All the Comforts of Home
Claire Jenkins (Bath Spa University, UK): “You’re just some bitch who broke my heart and cut up my mom’s wedding dress”: The significance of the wedding dress in romantic comedies
Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne, Australia): Sensuous Pleasures: The textural delights of Twilight’s ‘Bella bedding’
William Gleason (Princeton University, USA): Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love
3:00pm – 4:30pm, Saturday, September 29
Session 11: Happily Ever Afters–and Afters: Romance and Repetition
Madeleine Morris (RMIT International University, Vietnam): Ticket to Ride: An Inquiry Into The Supra-narrative Functions of the Happily Ever After Ending in Erotic Romance
An Goris (Katholik University of Leuven, Belgium): A Sequence of Sequels: The Pleasure of Serial Romance Narrative
Susan Kroeg (Eastern Kentucky University, USA): Multiple Pleasures: Repetition and Recognition in Single-Title Serial Romance Novels
4:30pm – 5:00pm, Saturday, September 29:
Farewell