A Call For Proposals
for
The Second Annual International Conference on Popular Romance:

Popular Romance Studies: Theory, Text and Practice

Brussels, Belgium
5-7 August, 2010

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in popular media throughout the world, from antiquity to the present.  We welcome analyses of individual texts—books, films, websites, songs, performances—as well as broader inquiries into the creative industries that produce and market popular romance and into the emerging critical practice of popular romance studies.

This conference has three main goals:

• To bring to bear contemporary critical theory on the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from all national and cultural traditions
• To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of popular romance, by documenting and/or theorizing what happens to tropes and texts as they move across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries
• To explore the relationships between popular romance tropes and texts as they circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film, or from song to music video), between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

IASPR is pleased and proud to announce that the Keynote Speakers for the conference will be Celestino Deleyto, University of Zaragoza, Spain, Lynne Pearce, Lancaster University, UK, and Pamela Regis, McDaniel College, USA.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2010 and direct questions to: conferences@iaspr.org.

We are currently pursuing funds to help defray the cost of travel to Belgium for the conference.  If these funds become available, we will notify those accepted how to apply for support from IASPR.

Proposals will be examined by the conference’s scientific committee, which will decide about acceptance or rejection of proposals in the course of January 2010. The scientific committee consists of the following members:

• Theo D’Haen is a Full Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where he mainly teaches American Literature. His research interests include (post)modernism, postcolonialism, popular culture and prose genres.
• Jan Baetens is a Full Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and an expert in literary and cultural theory, francophone poetry, new media, photography, paraliterature (comics, graphic novel) and visual analysis.
• Bart Keunen is a Full Professor at Ghent University (Belgium). His research interests include comparative literature, literature and sociology, popular literature and urbanism.
• Eric Selinger is an Associate Professor of English at DePaul University (Chicago, USA) where he teaches courses on Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Poetry Pedagogy, and Romance Fiction. He is a prominent popular romance scholar and executive editor of Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
• Tamar Jeffers McDonald is a lecturer at the University of Kent (UK). She is a film scholar, whose main research interests include romantic comedy, the expressionist potential of film costume, and film performances of sexuality, especially virginity.
• Sarah Frantz is an Assistant Professor of English at Fayetteville State University (USA) and specializes in eighteenth century British literature (specifically women authors) and popular romance. She is the founder and current president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
• Hsu-Ming Teo is lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). As a cultural historian and novelist her research interests include twentieth-century European history, British imperial culture, travel and tourism, and popular literature; she is currently pursuing multiple research projects on popular romance.
• Sandra Schwab is a lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg-University (Mainz, Germany), where she recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation “Of Dragons, Knights, and Virgin Maidens: Dragonslaying and Gender Roles from Richard Johnson to Modern Popular Fiction.” (to be published in 2010). She is also an accomplished popular romance writer.

IASPR Webpage: http://iaspr.org

Conference page: http://iaspr.org/conferences/belgium