ROMANCING ACADEMIA: pLACING ROMANCE
Friday 22 August 2025
This runs concurrently with the other workshops so you cannot attend more than 1 session on Friday.
We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 3rd May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.
Nipaluna, Lutrawita – the location of the Romance Writers of Australia conference in 2025 – has long been considered the Writer Wonderland that the conference’s theme promises it to be. The island is a place of meeting, storytelling, and romance, often generating stories belonging to diverse varieties of genres and marked by a distinctive sense of place. In 2023, Nipaluna/Hobart was officially designated a UNESCO City of Literature, joining a global network of writer’s places.
The concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies, driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia 2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry. In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are together often described by readers and writers using the spatial metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place (2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations – place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and scholarly engagement.
Proposed papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as ‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not limited to):
- “Romancelandia” and its different characteristics
- Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
- Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
- Food as a metaphor for place
- Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
- Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
- Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
- Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
- Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
- The place of romance in public libraries
We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 3rd May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.
The English and Writing program at the University of Tasmania is proud to support Romancing Academia: Placing Romance
ROMANCING ACADEMIA registration only $80!
Wanting to just attend Romancing Academia and not the full conference? You can do so via the link below!
INCLUSIONS IN ROMANCING ACADEMIA REGISTRATION
- All entitlements for Friday 22 August 2025
- Attendance at booked Romancing Academia
- All official documentation for the workshop (as provided by the convenors)
- Morning tea and lunch as scheduled