2019 Francis Award: Call for Submissions!

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The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) calls for submissions for the third annual Conseula Francis Award. The Francis Award is given out each year for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and / or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. Essays may focus on work in any medium (e.g., fiction, film, TV, music, comics, or advice literature) or on topics related to real-world courtship, dating, relationships, and love. The winning essay will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies, pending any needed revision according to the judges’ comments.

The Francis Award is in honor and memory of our colleague Conseula Francis, who was associate provost and professor of English and African American Studies at the College of Charleston. The author of The Critical Reception of James Baldwin: 1963-2010 (2014) and the editor of Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009), Francis studied popular romance fiction with particular attention on African American authors and representations of Black love. Priority for the Francis Award will therefore be given to manuscripts that address the diversity of, and diversities within, popular romance and romantic love culture: e.g., diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexuality, disability, or age.

The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2018, and the winner will be announced in April, in time for the Popular Culture Association’s national conference.

All submissions should be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Please put “Francis Award” in your subject line.  All submissions must be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; in keeping with JPRS publication guidelines we will consider essays of 5000 to ~10,000 words in length.  Please remove your name or the name of any co-authors from the submitted manuscript; in your cover-letter email, please provide your contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a 150-200 word abstract of the submission.

The judges for the Francis Award are a mix of established and emerging scholars in the field of Popular Romance Studies, chosen by IASPR. Each year’s winner will be invited to join the panel of judges for the following year.  

Seidel Travel Grants for 2018 Sydney Conference!

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Thanks to a generous donation from American romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel, travel support for junior scholars will be available for “Think Globally, Love Locally,” the Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance.

This Seidel Travel Grant is intended to foster the future of scholarship on romance in genre fiction, film, TV, and other forms of popular culture by helping with travel costs for graduate students, non-tenured faculty (tenure stream or contingent / adjunct), and independent scholars attending the 2018 IASPR conference in Sydney, Australia.

Eligible scholars whose proposals have been accepted for the conference may apply for the Seidel Travel Grant. Details on how to apply will be included in the proposal acceptance email. All funds will be disbursed by check or cash at the conference.The deadline for proposals is September 15, 2017. The Call for Papers can be found here.

Seidel wrote her first romance novel not long after finishing her Ph.D. in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her many acclaimed novels, including the RITA-award winning contemporary romance Again (1995), she is the author of “Judge Me By the Joy I Bring,” the final essay in the 1992 anthology, Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women.

A supporter of IASPR since its inception, Seidel has funded travel grants for graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty presenting on popular romance at the Popular Culture Association national conference and at IASPR’s international gatherings. We are grateful for her generous and continuing support.

 

Popular Romance and Men’s / Masculinity Studies

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Brandon University professor Jonathan A. Allan (Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory) is looking for proposals on men / masculinities in popular romance fiction for the 2018 American Men’s Studies Association conference, which will be held March 22-25 in Minneapolis, MN. The deadline in the CFP is October 15, 2017.

Jonathan was one of the guest editors of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies special issue on Queer/ing Popular Romance, and he is currently at work on a book called Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance (Routledge).

There’s a lot of work to be done on this topic, not least because the romance archive includes masculinities that range from the hyper-hegemonic to the quietly or radically disruptive, and the Call for Papers makes it clear that the conference is open to an equally wide range of topics. Their bullet point list includes:

  • Queering masculinities, sexualities, bodies
  • Transgender studies and men’s studies
  • Men and/or masculinities in BDSM and leather cultures
  • Masculinities and sexualities (i.e. heterosexual, gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc.)
  • Effeminophobia in/and theories of masculinity
  • Fantasies and desires in/through bodies and masculinities
  • The material, phenomenological, and real body
  • Pharmaceutical and medical interventions on the body
  • Masculinities without men, men without masculinities
  • Men, bodies, and digital technologies
  • Aging, youth, and sexualities across the life-span

 

If you’re interested in pursuing this, please get in touch with Jonathan, or with me (Eric Selinger, IASPR president) before the October 15 deadline.

The intersection of popular romance studies and men’s / masculinity studies is a very promising development in our field. There is work, wild work, to be done!

 

Keynote Speakers Announced for 2018 Conference!

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The Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance, “Think Globally, Love Locally,” is proud to announce Keynote Speakers for our June, 2018 conference:

Lisa Fletcher, University of Tasmania  

Beth Driscoll, University of Melbourne

Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland

Along with their outstanding individual contributions to the theory, history, and practice (for Wilkins) of popular fiction, our speakers are also three of the four Chief Investigators on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Genre Worlds: Australian Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” a systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century.

In 2015, “Genre Worlds” also received grant funding from the Romance Writers of America to develop case studies of authors at different stages in their careers, exploring the creative processes whereby works of genre fiction are created, published, and marketed.

The conference CFP can be found here, with a deadline of September 15, 2017.

News about travel support is coming—stay tuned!

In Answer to the Question…

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In answer to the question, “It is generally believed that genres with happy endings have less literary or cultural merit than those without.  What do you think about this?”

(Part of a conversation that may be published, this was left on the cutting room floor.)

I have two or three thoughts about this.

The first is that this idea has deep roots: comedy is less noble than tragedy, all the way back to Aristotle; comedy is for the hoi-polloi; happy endings are trivial or childish, etc. This “general belief” has inertia on its side, and perpetuates itself in many ways across our educational system. I’ve seen it happen firsthand. When my daughter was in fourth grade, I got to visit her “gifted” reading class and sit in on their discussion of a book called Bud, Not Buddy. The teacher asked each student to predict the novel’s ending, and after they did, she said something like, “I notice that all of you predicted a happy ending. But as you grow up, you’re going to read fewer and fewer books with happy endings.” The notion of being a gifted, superior sort of reader was already being linked to being a reader of books without happy endings, and this was by a truly brilliant, dedicated teacher—someone who firmly believed that she was opening minds, not closing them.

This leads me to my second thought, which is that this belief isn’t altogether silly or ridiculous. I can think of plenty of ways that a longing for the happy ending—whether narrowly defined, in a romantic sense, or more broadly, just in terms of success for the protagonist—can lead us into the temptation of kitsch, or simply into caring so much about our protagonists and their immediate circle that we no longer care about the broader world around them. (Last year’s controversy over “That Book”–the RITA nominee with the Nazi / Jewish love story, illustrates the first of these; the endings of any number of historical romance novels might illustrate the second.)

So, yes, there’s reason to be wary—but we need to be wary of lots of things, right?

This leads me to my third thought about the cultural status of happy-ending genres, which comes from Ursula K. LeGuin. There’s a passage from her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that’s a touchstone for me, and has been since I first read it at twelve or thirteen. “We have a bad habit,” the narrator says, “encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”

What’s interesting to me about this passage—and about this story as a whole—is that LeGuin tells us something profoundly true here, and she underscores it throughout the story: the people of Omelas are not naïve; their happiness is not stupid; there’s a nobility and poignancy and profundity to their world, as there can be to a work in a happy ending genre. And yet, that’s not the end of the story. There are the folks who walk away from that beautiful city, right? But they do so in the hope of something better, not in self-flattery over their own sophistication, or at least it’s pretty think so.

If I were going to read something without a happy ending, knowing that going in, I’d want to do so because I knew that what I was going to get was actually walking away from Omelas, and not just hanging around to make fun of it, if that makes sense. (I suspect I’m misreading the story somewhat, perhaps more sympathetically to the city-dwellers than I’m supposed to, but then, I also doubt I’d be the one to walk away.)

—EMS

Noted With Interest: Romance Conferences!

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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)

And the Winner Is…

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The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Conseula Francis Award for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and/or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. The winning essay this year is “The Stable Muslim Love Triangle – Triangular Desire in Black Muslim Romance Fiction,” by Layla Abdullah-Poulos of SUNY Empire State College: a groundbreaking study of “the amalgamation of Islamic, Black American, and American notions of love, courtship, and sexual dialogue” in this emerging textual corpus.

As the winning essay, “The Stable Muslim Love Triangle” will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Abdullah-Poulos will also join the the panel of judges for next year’s Francis Award.

Announcing the 7th International Conference on Popular Romance Studies!

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Accepting proposals through September 15, 2017!

Think Globally, Love Locally?
Sydney, Australia
27-29 June, 2018

Keynote Speakers: Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania); Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne); Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland)

Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy / girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical and virtual settings. The romance industry may be globalized, but popular romance culture is always situated: produced and circulated in distinctive localities and spaces, online and offline. Love plays out in real-world contexts of migration and dislocation; love figures in representations of assimilation and cultural resistance; in different times and places, radically disparate political movements—revolutionary, reactionary, and everything in between—have all deployed the rhetoric and imagery of love.

For its seventh international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance calls for papers on romantic love and popular culture, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world. We are particularly interested, this year, on papers that address the relationship between love and locality in popular culture: not just in fictional modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction, etc.), but also in didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals, journalism), in advertising, and in both digital and material culture (wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.).

The conference will be held at Macquarie University’s city campus, 123 Pit Street, Sydney. The venue is in the heart of Sydney’s CBD shopping and dining precinct, a 15-minute walk away from the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and historic Rocks area.

Topics of interest might include:

  • Geographies of love and sexuality
  • Love’s Settings: e.g., the imagined Outback of Rural Romances; the Scottish Highlands; romantic cities; small-town and island romances; the communal space of “Romancelandia”
  • Romantic Chronotopes: times and places when love is imagined to be “truer” or “deeper” than the here-and-now (e.g., Regency or Victorian England; medieval Provence; Tang Dynasty China; the Joseon settings of Korean TV-drama, etc.)
  • Honeymoon travel (past and present) and romantic tourism, including fan pilgrimages for romantic texts and films, destination weddings, and the like
  • Locality and LGBTQIA romance culture
  • Courtship in public and semi-private spaces: e.g., paying visits, dating, office romance, romance and car culture
  • Love’s Architectures: Hotels, Fantasy Suites, Clubs and Restaurants, Domestic Spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, Red Rooms of Pain, etc.)
  • Local, National, and Transnational Book Industries
  • Local Romance Writer Groups, Reader Groups, or Media Fan Groups / Events
  • Romance and the (Local) Library or Bookshop
  • Local Love on Television (e.g., Farmer Wants a Wife) and online (Tinder, etc.)
  • “Escapist” reading and the places / practices of romance consumption
  • Place and Race in Popular Romance
  • The “Phone-World” and other Virtual Spaces for Love
  • Off the Map: Emerging and Under-Studied Settings and Romance Cultures
    • Material locations and imaginary spaces for love, and the combination of the two in Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace”
    • Migration and love: migration for love, love hampered by distance, love in migrant and refugee communities
    • Non-geographic love (e.g., love experienced entirely online) and the intersections of technology with long-distance love, now and in the past
    • Lieux de memoire in the context of romantic love (as opposed to national identity)
    • Love and nationalism, love and regionalism, love and (local) political struggle

All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including discussions of pedagogy.

Submit 250-300w proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to conferences@iaspr.org by 15 September 2017. All proposals will be peer reviewed.