In the spring of 2009, Sarah S. G. Frantz founded the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and its companion journal, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. After four remarkable years, marked by four international conferences, six issues of JPRS, and a co-edited volume (New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays), Sarah is stepping down from the presidency of IASPR, taking up a new position as Acquisition Editor for Riptide Publishing. (She is also a freelance romance editor and BDSM consultant at Alphabet Editing.)

We are happy to announce that Pamela Regis, formerly the Vice President of IASPR, will be assuming the Presidency of the organization. She is joined by two new officers as Vice-Presidents, An Goris and Jayashree Kamble, and by Chryssa Sharp as Treasurer. The Conference Chairs for our upcoming international conferences will be Betty Kaklamanidou (2014, Thessaloniki), Crystal Goldman (2016, San Jose), and Margaret Toscano (2018, Salt Lake City); in the interim years, IASPR will work with other organizations to foster scholarly panels and presentations on popular romance media at national and international gatherings sponsored by other organizations.

We thank Sarah for her vision and guidance, and we look forward to announcing more additions to the roster of IASPR board members and officers in the weeks to come.

The Fifth International Conference on Popular Romance Studies will focus on the romantic love and its representations in popular media, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world. It will be held at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, 19-21 June, 2014.

We are interested in scholarship on all forms of popular media: not just fictional modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction, etc.), but also didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals, newspaper debates about love or marriage “in crisis”), depictions of real-life love, and the representations of love, romance, and material culture deployed by advertising (wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.).

Please submit your proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration to conferences@iaspr.org by November 15, 2013.

See the official Call for Proposals for more details.