The Fourth Annual Conference on Popular Romance will focus on the Pleasures of Romance. It will be held in York, UK, 27-29 September, 2012.
This conference asks one large question: What is the place of pleasure in popular romance? Popular romance—whether romance novels, romantic films, soap operas, fan fiction, advertisements, etc.—has long been both consumed and derided because of the pleasures they impart: pleasures of sentiment, pathos, comfort, arousal, satisfaction, identification. This conference will consider “pleasure” in popular romance texts and popular romance studies.
Please submit your proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration to conferences@iaspr.org by May 1, 2012.
It’s our pleasure to announce the publication of The Journal of Popular Romance Studies: our peer-reviewed, on-line, open access academic journal dedicated to research and scholarship on representations of romantic love in global popular culture.
Available at http://jprstudies.org, issue 1.1 of the journal features five essays, five book reviews, and an interview with bestselling African American romance author Beverly Jenkins. The issue was published in conjunction with “Theorizing Popular Romance,” the second annual international conference of IASPR, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. The conference ran from August 5-8 at the Palais d’Academie in Brussels, Belgium, and featured thirty-two papers by scholars of film, literature, television and digital media from over a dozen countries.
Please spread the word–we’re looking for submissions for issue 1.2!
For its inaugural issue (Winter 2010), the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is now considering papers on representations of romantic love in popular media, now or in the past, from anywhere in the world.
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance is dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love. IASPR is committed to building a strong community of scholars of popular romance through open, digital access to all scholarly work published by the Association, by organizing or sponsoring an annual international conference on popular romance studies, and by encouraging the teaching of popular romance at all levels of higher education.
