There are two new articles out from the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and since one of them is by me, I'm going to show immense bias and make this a very short list instead of waiting for more new publications, and I'm also going to list my article first. Vivanco, Laura (2024). “Feeling Judged: Reflections on Pornography and Romance from a Minotaur Milking Farm.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13. I don't have any other scholarship in progress, which is a somewhat strange feeling. I'm still updating the Romance Scholarship Database, though, and every so often I come across items from ..read more

Riding The Tosh Horse: Ethel M. Dell, A Written Life by David Tanner, published by Brown Dog Books: The largely forgotten romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939) published alongside Rudyard Kipling and other literary giants but was vilified by George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse among many. Ethel was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about £4M annually in today’s values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of he ..read more

Videos are now freely available of some of the events from last year's Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope conference, held at Yale University. https://romancefictionconference.yale.edu/gallery/popular-romance-fiction-literature-hope-conference-photos-and-video --- Andrea Martucci's Shelf Love podcast episode about this exhibition of John Ennis's art for romance covers is available here: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-153/covering-romance-john-enniss-art-thoughts-on-fandom Smart Bitch Sarah's feedback (including lots of photos) on the exhibition can be f ..read more

IASPR is holding a Valentine's Day (well, Wednesday 14 February for some time zones) Romance Wikithon, with training from Amy Burge! It's not just for romance scholars: readers have lots of expertise to share too! Here's the description that was shared with those of us on the IASPR Discord group: Join us, this Valentines Day, to share our expertise as romance scholars [and readers] and increase the representation of romance on Wikipedia! Open to all.  This 90-minute session will be practical and informal. It is aimed at those who have never edited Wikipedia before. Training and guidanc ..read more

Lots of open access articles! Golubov, Nattie (2023). "Female Warriors, Social Injustice and the Transformational Force of Anger in Jaye Wells' Sabina Kane Series." Esferas Literarias 6: 21-37. Larson, Christine, and Ashley Carter (2023). "Love is love: Reverse isomorphism and the rise of LGBTQ+ romance publishing." New Media & Society. Markasović, Valentina (2023). "Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air Trilogy." Breaking Stereotypes in American Popular Culture: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the Croatian Association for American Studies: 41-56 ..read more

Maybe I've simplified things a little in the title of the post due to the allure of alliteration. But there's definitely a lot in these recent publications about race/ethnicity and racism. As always, if there's a hyperlink in the title, that means it's freely accessible online. ---- Abdullah-Poulos, Layla (2023) "Sisters, Skanks, and Jezebels: American Muslim Fiction and the Other Woman." The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. Ed. Hussein Rashid and Kristian Petersen. London: Bloomsbury. 205-214. [Excerpt here.] Derbyshire, Valerie Grace (2023). “ ‘Do you think I haven’t ..read more

From 16-18 August 2024 the Romance Writers of Australia will be holding their conference at Stamford Grand, Glenelg and, in collaboration with Flinders University, they're looking for romance scholars to join them on 16 August: The Degrees of Love Romance Research Hub at Flinders University, with the support of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts, is thrilled to host an academic symposium on popular romance studies as part of RWAus’ 2024 conference. Featuring the latest research from romance academics, and open to anyone with an enquiring mind who wishes to attend, this symposium will showcase ..read more

K. J. Charles (on BlueSky, which I don't think I can link to) posted a link to a New York Times article about new editions of Heyer with the antisemitism removed. I'm not honestly sure how I feel about that. She *was* antisemitic and racist, and if it is going to be done, there should absolutely be an afterword saying it was done. I feel the same. The author of the New York Times article, the appropriately named Alexandra Alter, states that: When Heyer’s American publisher, Sourcebooks, decided to release new editions of her romances this year, they had to strike a precarious balance. Leavi ..read more

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for a volunteer to become the next editor of the "Notes and Queries" section of the journal. More details here: https://www.jprstudies.org/journal-of-popular-romance-studies-notes-and-queries-editor/ Alice Liang takes a look at trends in cover design over the past few decades: https://pudding.cool/2023/10/romance-covers/ Audrey Lavallée is starting to publish a series of blog posts about the history of Canadian romance publishing. There's an introduction to the series here and the first post is about Julia Catherine Beckwith's St. Ursula’s Conv ..read more

Charlotte of Close Reading Romance has written a series of posts thinking through how any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kin ..read more