cfp.english.upenn.edu

CFP: PCA 2011--San Antonio, TX. April 20-23, 2011

We're soliciting proposals for the Romance Area for the Popular Culture Association conference. This year it's in San Antonio, TX. As always, it's the Wednesday-Saturday of Easter/Passover weekend, April 20-23, 2011.

PCA is an amazing conference to go to to experience the community of Popular Romance Studies. It's a VERY inviting conference for new scholars, and for interested non-scholars. We've had undergraduates and brand new graduate students very successfully present papers at PCA. We're welcoming, friendly, fun, a little bawdy, and very very interesting.

(Conference info: http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php)

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2010.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics (although we are by no means limited to these):
*Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
*Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
*Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
*Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
*Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
*Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
*BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
*Romance communities
*New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
*The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
*Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
*Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
*African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
*Young Adult Romance
*History of/in Popular Romance
*Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
*Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we have done for the past three years, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. Of particular interest this year: the 2011 New York City conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance http://iaspr.org, planning for the 2012 IASPR conference, and the first volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies http://jprstudies.org.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by December 15, 2010, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1438
sarahfrantz AT gmail DOT com

Darcy Martin
Adjunct Faculty, Women's Studies
East Tennessee State University
12 Wataugua Court
Bluffton, SC 29909
(843)705-4861
martindj AT etsu DOT edu

If you have any questions as all, please contact one or both of the area chairs. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.