Sarah Ailwood is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Canberra. In 2008 she completed her PhD ”What men ought to be’: Masculinities in Jane Austen’s novels’. Her research interests focus on women’s writing and gender studies.

Federica Balducci is a PhD Candidate at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research interests include Italian romance fiction, women writers, publishing, cultural studies, and popular culture.

Sandra Barletta, German born, raised in the USA, and a Brisbanite, holds a BA in Linguistics and a recently completed a masters in Creative Writing from QUT. A romance scholar and romance writer, she has been reading, writing, and honing her craft for the last 6 years, which means her house is full of dust bunnies and books.

Devaleena Das is a young research scholar in the Department of English, University of Calcutta working on the spatial and temporal relations in Australian poet Judith Wright’s works. She teaches (Undergraduate level) English literature at Gokhale Memorial Girls’ College and Jaipuria College as Guest-Lecturer and Part-Time Lecturer respectively, has written for the prestigious Indian newspaper The Statesman, and has presented papers at major international and national conferences on Australian Studies, Shakespeare, and Media, Culture, and Ideology.

Therese Dryden writes for the Mills & Boon Romance/Sweet line under the pen-name Michelle Douglas. She is enrolled in an M.Phil at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Jin Feng is Associate Professor of Chinese and Japanese at Grinnell College, USA. She has published The New Woman in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue UP, 2004), Chen Hengzhe’s Early Autobiography (Anhui Education Publications, 2006), and several scholarly articles. She also has a book forthcoming from SUNY Press in November this year, entitled: The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College. Her research interests include narratives, gender studies, and the Chinese diaspora. She is currently working on web-based popular Chinese literature.

Juliet Flesch: After taking first degree from the University of Melbourne, I qualified as a librarian while working at the National Library of Australia between 1965 and 1978. I was appointed foundation Principal Librarian (Collections) at the University of Melboune in 1978, a position I occupied until the end of 1997. Since then I have been engaged in commissioned research and postgraduate studies, taking my PhD in 2002. My publications include From Australia with Love (2004); Minding the Shop (2005); Spanning the Centuries (2008).

Sarah S. G. Frantz is Assistant Professor of Literature at Fayetteville State University, NC, and the founder and president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Sarah received her Ph.D. in Romantic-era British women novelists from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and uses her theoretical focus on how female authors construct their male characters to analyze modern popular romance fiction, as well as Jane Austen’s novels. Sarah is the co-editor with Eric Selinger of New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction (McFarland, forthcoming) and has authored numerous academic articles on both Austen and popular romance fiction. She reviews m/m romance and BDSM romance for Dear Author and is a contributing writer to Teach Me Tonight and Romancing the Blog.

Toni Johnson-Woods is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She teaches popular fiction and creative writing and is currently researching Australian pulp fiction of the 1950s. She has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century popular fiction in Australia, USA and UK. Her edited book Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives will be published in November 2009. If she were a book, she’d be Forever Amber.

Jennifer Kloester is a Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the author of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World. she is a foremost expert on the life and works of the popular historical novelist and has recently completed a new biography of Georgette Heyer (due out in 2010).

Stephanie Moody is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Joint Program of English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her interests include genre theory, new literacy studies, and gender studies.

Pushkar Raj is a young consultant in Deloitte and Touché AERS Pvt. Ltd and an independent scholar of Indian and world cinema, literature, philosophy, theology, and politics. Though not a Bengali himself, he has been attracted to Bengali literature and film and this paper will be an invigorating observation of a person from the world of technology and industry.

Eric Murphy Selinger is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, USA, where he teaches courses on poetry and popular romance fiction. The author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998), he has co-edited two collections of essays on American poetry; with Sarah S. G. Frantz, he is currently editing New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction (McFarland, forthcoming). Recipient of the 2006-7 Academic Research Grant from the Romance Writers of America, he is founder of the RomanceScholar listserv and co-organizer of “Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture” (Princeton University, 2009) and of the Brisbane Popular Romance conference.

Dr Anthea Taylor is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. She publishes widely on feminism, women’s writing, and contemporary media culture, including Mediating Australian Feminism (Peter Lang, 2008).

Hsu-Ming Teo is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). She is the co-editor of Cultural History in Australia (UNSW Press 2003) as well as the author of a range of academic articles and book chapters on the history of travel and tourism, Orientalism, and popular fiction. She is an editorial board member of the Journal of Australian Studies. She is currently completing on a book about historical representations of Arabs and Muslims in western women’s popular culture.

Kim Wilkins teaches Writing, Editing, and Publishing at the University of Queensland, where she researches in the field of popular medievalism. She is also a novelist, and last year won the RWA’s Romantic Book of the Year award for work published under her pseudonym Kimberley Freeman.

Enid Wilson loves sexy romance. Her writing career began with a daily newspaper, writing educational advice for students. She then branches out into writing marketing materials and advertising copies. Enid’s first paranormal novel In Quest of Theta Magic, received several top reviews. Her second historical romance, Bargain with the Devil, is released in August 2009.

Check again soon–there are more to come!