About the Conference

Keynote speaker: Deborah Jermyn
Plenary speaker: Hsu-Ming Teo

Eros, Philia, Agape: for nearly three thousand years, these three Greek terms have been used in the West to triangulate the shifting concept called “romantic love,” not just in philosophy and theology, but also in popular culture. In other parts of the globe, love gets framed quite differently—by ‘ishq and hub and their cognates, by shringara and bhakti and prem, by the shifting codes of qing and aiqing—but no matter the language, debates about what love is, how it should feel, and how a lover should behave cross the great divides that separate high art and intellectual discourse from kitsch, journalism, and popular culture.

For its fifth international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance focused on romantic love and its representations in popular media, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world.

Conference Presentations

Keynote & Plenary

• The New Romantics?: Meryl Streep, contemporary romcom and the ‘graying’ of Hollywood cinema
  Deborah Jermyn (University of Roehampton, UK)
• Beyond Desert Passions: Rethinking Orientalist Love, Rereading Sheikh Romance Novels
  Hsu-Ming Teo (Macquarie University, Australia)

 

Romance Versions of Greece

• Perpetuating Gender Stereotypes: The 1960s Greek Rom Com
  Betty Kaklamanidou (Aristotle University, Greece)
• Greek Lover or Simply a Hero? Oriental and Occidental Attitudes and Behaviours in Romance Fiction
  Eirini Arvanitaki (University of Hull, UK)
• What Does it Take to Be a Greek Protagonist within a British Popular Romance?
  Artemis Lambrinou (Independent Scholar)

 

Who’s In? Who’s Out? Romance and Representation

• Love in the Digital Library: A Search for Racial Heterogeneity in E-Books
  Renee Bennett-Kapusniak & Adriana McCleer (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)
• A Meta of Romance in Libraries: The impact of the under-representation of romance fiction in metadata and metatexts
  Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney)
• From Contemporary to Dystopian Fiction: The Changing Realities in Paranormal Romance
  Maria Ramos-Garcia (South Dakota State University, USA)

 

Love as Image, Love as Narrative

• (Another) Eight Essential Elements of the Romance Novel
  Catherine Roach (Alabama University, USA)
• Rendering the Romance: image and storytelling in The Ethiopian Story and The Windflower
  Angela Toscano (University of Iowa, USA)
• Deep structures of Popular Romance Fiction
  Lesley Ann Smith (Curtin University, Australia)

 

Television and the Internet

• Hurrem in the Harem: The Sheik Fantasy on Turkish Television
  Heather Schell (George Washington University, USA)
• “Before You Find True Love, You’re Gonna Need Some Tough Love:” Constructing the Matchmaker Figure in Romance-Based Reality TV
  Patrycja Wawryka (University of Ottawa, Canada)
• Relocating Weddings Online
  Alicia Williams (Independent Scholar)

 

Science and Romance

• What’s Love Got to do with it?: Helen Fisher and the Science of Love
  Peggy Tally (Empire State College, USA)
• Affectionate temporalities. On time in love in a quasi-scientific sense
  Anna Malinowska (University of Silesia, Poland)
• Romancing Science: An Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies in Popular Science Television
  Erin S. Young (Empire State College, USA)

 

Love, American Style

• Child’s Play? An American Philosopher’s Historical Romance Novel
  Pamela Regis (McDaniel College, USA)
• Reconcilable Differences: Post-9/11 American Captivity Fantasies in Sheikh Romance
  Stacy Holden (Purdue University, USA)

 

Loves Unorthodox, Unspeakable, and Unsexed

• “Loves That Dare Not Speak Their Names”: Bisexuality, Asexuality, and Polyamory in Popular Cultural Discourse
  Zefi Kavvadia (Aristotle University, Greece)
• The Politics of Polyamory and Violence: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series
  Karin Heiß (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
• Unsexing Eros: Queer Intimacies in Contemporary Fiction and Film
  Ashley C. Bourgeois (University of Kentucky, USA)

 

East Meets East

• When the East Encounters the Orient
  Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University)
• The Transmutation of Harem Imagination from Translated Desert Romances to Contemporary Chinese Popular Romance in Taiwan
  Su-hsen Liu (National Quemoy University, Taiwan)

 

Scandinavia and Eros

• Love in a Cold Climate? Romance, Power and Desire in the Scandinavian Romance Tradition
  Maria Nilson (Linnaeus University, Sweden)
• Simona Ahrnstedt and New Swedish Romance
  Helene Ehriander (Linnaeus University, Sweden)

 

Authors, Scholars, and the Market Matrix

• Author as Producer, Brand and Friend: Considering the Structure of the Romance Novel Marketplace
  Chryssa Sharp (Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri)
• Triumphs in the Marketplace: An Updated Look at Romance’s Institutional Matrix
  An Goris (Leuven University, Belgium)
• Studying (the) Romance (Novels): Negotiating the Journey from Doctoral Research to Book Publication
  Jayashree Kamble (LaGuardia Community College, USA)

 

Romance and Religion: Global Perspectives

• Romancing the Goddess: Desire in the Popular Religious Mythology of Hindu South India
  Charles Nuckolls (Brigham Young University)
• How Indonesian Religious Romance engages with Popular Romance Tropes in the West
  Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud (Brunei University)
• I Want to be Your Husband, Not Your God: the Allusive Art of Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love
  Eric Selinger (DePaul University, USA)

 

Love’s Stories: Virginity, Courtship, Divorce

• Falling in love with virginity: the changing relationship between romantic love and virginity loss in the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance
  Jodi McAlister (Macquarie University, Australia)
• The Courtship of Penelope and Odysseus
  Margaret Toscano (University of Utah)
• Understand After Forever. Love Narratives of Divorcees
  Marie-Louise Wijne (University of Amsterdam)

 

Advice for the Lovelorn: Mediated Love

• The perils of falling in love in late medieval and modern relationship advice
  Amy Burge (Edinburgh University, UK)
• “Love Me, Don’t Love Your Family: Discussing and Debunking Romantic Love On the Chinese Internet”
  Jin Feng (Grinnell College, USA)
• Feminism, Race, and Romance
  Julie E. Moody-Freeman (DePaul University, USA)

 

Love’s Bodies: Ability, Technology, and Race

• The Blindman in the Romance Novel: Jane Eyre and the Representation of Visual Impairment
  Ria Cheyne (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
• Tinkering: Physical construction and emotional connection in the Iron Seas world
  Sarah Ficke (Marymount University, USA)
• “He Didn’t Seem Indian”: Exploring and Analyzing the Construction of Race in Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows
  Mallory Jagodzinski (Bowling Green State University, USA)