The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR)
University of Queensland
Queensland University of Technology
DePaul University
Romance Writers of America
Samhain Publishing
DePaul University
and others
were proud to sponsor

POPULAR ROMANCE STUDIES
An International Conference

For decades, scholars have studied representations of romantic love in popular media: novels, films, magazines, comics, advertisements, and elsewhere. They have studied its sexual politics and aesthetic structures, its audiences, its authors, and the industry that produces and distributes it world-wide. For the most part, however, they have done so in isolation, divided by boundaries of nation, genre, and academic discipline.

On August 13-14, 2009, the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology hosted “Popular Romance Studies: an International Conference,” held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Romance Writers of Australia, and sponsored by Depaul University, the Romance Writers of America, and Samhain Publishing.

Scholars from Australia, the United States, Korea, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere convened for this event, which took place on the QUT campus (Thursday) and at the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library (Friday), home to a remarkable archival collection of Australian romance materials.

Papers were accepted on romance websites in China, Japanese romance manga, Italian romanzo rosa, and the novels of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer; we were eager to expand the range of talks both geographically and in terms of the media discussed.

This was the inaugural conference of IASPR, the new International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. The best papers from the conference were published in the inaugural issue of JPRS: the Journal for Popular Romance Studies, a peer-reviewed on-line journal to be published by IASPR in Winter (February) 2010.