Although the next official IASPR conference–our seventh gathering, taking us back to Australia–isn’t for another year, we’re very happy to see a number of other, unaffiliated conferences on popular romance fiction / media / culture. The two most recent, at least that we know of, both focus on the local and global diversity of the genre, and on diversity within it.

Last April, Williams College hosted “Reading for Pleasure: Romance Fiction in the International Marketplace” (schedule here), which brought together fourteen scholars, authors, bloggers, and romance industry professionals to talk about topics from multicultural romance in the US to local and transnational romance fiction in the UK, China, Indonesia, Turkey, and post-Communist Russia. A selection of papers from the conference will appear in our open-access / peer reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies, so keep an eye out for that.

Meanwhile, this summer, even as I speak, the Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands is hosting an “international seminar on languages and cultures in contact in the romance novel.” There doesn’t seem to be an official conference website, but Laura Vivanco, who is speaking on “Changing Attitudes to Others: Meljean Brook’s Riveted (2012) and its Context,” has kindly posted a list of other presentations and their authors, which you can find here. The conference is being tweeted out by IASPR Vice President Jayashree Kamblé, among others, with the hashtag #ULPGCRomance.

Laura reports that there are plans in the works for the ULPGC conference proceedings to be published “at some point.” When I learn when, I’ll let you know.

–EMS (President of IASPR)