Romance Revitalised (Birmingham 2023) | 2023 Registration | 2023 Lodging and Travel Information | 2023 Conference Dinner Information

***Below is the schedule for the 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