cfp.english.upenn.edu

Love and romance are mainstays of popular culture, cutting across the great divides of medium, language, and historical period. From Beyoncé to Bollywood, Dan Savage to Sweet Savage Love, K-Pop to qawwali: if it’s about love, it’s a welcome topic at the PCA Romance area.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in 90-minute slots, typically with four 15-minute papers or speakers per standard session, with the remaining time available for discussion.

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 popular romance culture, please contact us!

Some possible topics for Romance (although we are by no means limited to these):

• Love, Globally: local traditions, transnational media, adaptation and translation issues
• Fifty Shades of WTF: the reception of popular romance
• Romance Across the Media
• Romance High and Low (i.e., texts that remix or blur distinctions between “high” and “low” culture)
• Modern Love, Postmodern Love, and Romantic Nostalgia
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Kink romance
• Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
• Romance communities, IRL and on-line
• The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
• African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
• Young Adult Romance
• History of/in Popular Romance
• Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)

As we do every year, 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. All are welcome to attend.

Presenters are encouraged to make use of the new array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography http://www.romancewiki.com/Romance_Scholarship, the RomanceScholar listserv http://mailman.depaul.edu/mailman/listinfo/romancescholar, and the peer-reviewed articles and interviews published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies http://jprstudies.org. Area co-chairs Eric Selinger and An Goris are the Executive Editor and Managing Editor, respectively, of this open-access journal.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract by November 30, 2012, to the PCA/ACA conference database: http://ncp.pcaaca.org/
Directions for submission: http://pcaaca.org/conference/proposing_presentation.php

Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

If you have any questions as all, please contact the area co-chairs:

Eric Selinger
Professor of English
DePaul University
eselinge@depaul.edu

An Goris
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Leuven
An.Goris@arts.kuleuven.be