Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Academia
May 14, 2012 | Monday | 11 Comments
Awhile back, I was contacted by Beth, a library science student, about doing a school project. She needed to create an annotated bibliography, and wanted to know if I'd like to be her "client" for the project: "I am taking a course called Search and Discovery, which is a fancy name for using and evaluating online research tools and databases. Our final project for the course is to compile an annotated bibliography for someone with a research need." I fail to see how this could possibly be a bad thing. Beth has piles and piles of databases at her fingertips,…
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January 28, 2010 | Thursday | 24 Comments
Grab your lasso and your chaps, because we’re going back to college to round up some romance in academia links. First: on 23 February at 12:30 pm at Brandeis University, documentary filmmaker Laurie Kahn, who directed Tupperware!, a documentary about Tupperware and the women behind it, for PBS’ American Experience, will be talking about her new work-in-progress, “Creating the Popular Romance.” From the press release, sent to me by awesome reader Michael: The world of romance novels (who writes them? who reads them? who publishes them? why are they so popular? and what do they say about our culture?) is…
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May 02, 2009 | Saturday | 15 Comments
As Malle Vallik pointed out in her Tweet about this article, author Joanne Rendell has posted a marvelous examination of romance in academia and in the current market economy over at Huffington Post. ...the accompanying explanation that “escapist urges” are fueling these sales wasn’t satisfactory for me. Isn’t all fiction escapist in some way? I wondered. And why are readers escaping into this particular kind of fiction? ...I realized that it was too hasty to rush to this conclusion. Romances are not one kind of thing. Neither are their readers. And to draw fast conclusions about the genre and its…
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April 24, 2009 | Friday | 23 Comments
I haven’t been able to keep an active transcript of every presentation, though I know Sarah Frantz has, and once her entry is up I will certainly link to it. But if you’ve been following the Twitter feed for the conference you’ve heard very, very brief snippets of the proceedings. Twitter is great for real time updates but in terms of the layered depth of the presentations, 140 characters is nowhere near enough. It’s impossible for me to capture the amazing thematic ideas and concepts that are being discussed. Session I: Love and Faith: Romance and Religion Evangelical romance fans…
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April 24, 2009 | Friday | 7 Comments
After a night of dueling pianos and a very late bedtime, Jane and I headed over to the Wyndham Convention Center this mornign under the impression that our panel on blogging was at 230 pm. In fact, I booked the flight to Princeton based on the idea that I wouldn’t be able to leave until after 5pm. Imagine my shock when, at 11:10 I received a text from Jane saying, “Our session is at 11:30am.” It was at 11:30 on the scheduled card in our registration, too, and I hadn’t noticed. DOH. I was being interviewed by a holy crapping…
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April 22, 2009 | Wednesday | 14 Comments
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned the epic clusterfuck of travel I have going on this week, but in case you’re curious, here we go. Presently I’m at Romantic Times in Orlando, where today I’m on a panel about historical romance with Jane. Then, this afternoon I’m on a panel about social networking and new media with Ron Hogan. That will be so difficult, since there’s really nothing about Twitter or the growing power of using a social network to reach consumers (*koff koff Dominos *koff koff Amazon) that we can talk about in terms of author promotion. Then tomorrow…
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March 28, 2009 | Saturday | 6 Comments
Smack in the middle of RT, I’m flying up to Princeton to take part in a closing plenary at the Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture conference. Check out the schedule. No, specifically, the plenary I’m on: 5:30-6:30 Closing Roundtable: Romance Reads the Academy * Michelle Buonfiglio, blogger and reviewer (Romance: B(u)y the Book) * Sarah Wendell, blogger and reviewer (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) * Diane Pershing, romance author, President, Romance Writers of America (2008-2009) * Monica Jackson, author, paranormal romance; contributor to “Blogging in Black” and other author websites…
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November 24, 2008 | Monday | 35 Comments
Here’s a unique Bitchery request: old editions of Nora Roberts novels - for academic study! An writes: I’m a graduate student pursuing a PhD on romance, genre and authorship based on Nora Roberts’ oeuvre. For my research I need old editions of Nora’s novels and I have some difficulty getting my hands on old romance novels. I analyze both the text and the paratext - cover, blurbs, etc. - of romance novels, which means that each new edition of a book is important to my analysis, even if no changes to the text have been made. For example, Nora’s first…
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May 16, 2008 | Friday | 24 Comments
Bitchery regular who wishes to remain somewhat anonymous is looking for syllabus assistance, as she was deeply impressed with your work shaping the syllabus for Dr. Frantz’s syllabus last January. She writes: The course I’m designing is primarily on the *rhetoric* of the romance (and just plain romance itself)—how it’s talked about, portrayed in the media, presented in bookstores, used in advertisting, etc. However, in order to give my students a better sense of the genre as a whole, I’d like to give them reading assignments from the primary source material. Which is where the Bitchery comes in. Are there…
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