Miss New Orleans? Never! (PCA Call for Papers)

There's just one month left to get your proposals in for the PCA/ACA 2015 National Conference Romance area!  The conference will be held in New Orleans, April 1-4, 2015.  Don't learn what it means to miss New Orleans--put in your proposal and visit, instead!


Here's the official Call for Papers--please feel free to share it and spread the word.

Call For Papers: Romance Area

Deadline for submission:  November 1, 2014

The discourse of romantic love permeates popular culture.  The Romance area includes papers on love, romance, and relationships, in real life and as represented in any medium, now and in the past.  From ad campaigns to Supreme Court decisions, 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 and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in popular romance culture, please contact us!

Some possible topics include:

• Love and Romance in New Orleans:  Vampire romances, The Big Easy, Nora Roberts’ Midnight Bayou, etc.
• Love, Globally:  local traditions, transnational media, adaptation and translation issues
• Romantic love in political discourse (e.g., marriage equality cases and campaigns)
• Virginity, Dating, Marriage, Adultery, Divorce, Hooking Up, FWBs: advice texts and media representations
• Queering the Romance: LGBT romance, Kink in romance, Polyamory, Asexuality, etc.
• Romance High and Low (i.e., texts that remix or blur distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, like the Lizzie Bennet Diaries)
• Love Theory / Romance Practice:  theoretical approaches to love and romance, and popular romance as a place where love is theorized
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Romance bloggers and readers:  scholars, critics, and communities IRL and online
• Young Adult, Paranormal, and other emerging genres of romance fiction
• 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 array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography, the RomanceScholar listserv, and the  peer-reviewed articles and interviews published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract by November 1, 2014, to the PCA/ACA conference database.  Directions for submission can be found here.

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 chair:

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