I'm an independent scholar and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
My books on romance fiction are:
- Faith, Love, Hope and Popular Romance Fiction (2020) which is available free, in full, on this website, in which I argue that "modern popular romances are novels whose authors have assumed pastoral roles, offering hope to their readers through works which propagate faith in the goodness and durability of love."
- Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction (2016)
- For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance (2011).
I have also written a number of articles about popular romance fiction.
I have created and maintain a database of scholarship on popular romance novels. There's a short introduction to using the Romance Scholarship Database here . In selecting entries, I'm guided by the definition of romance provided by the editors of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction:
novels that are written in various parts of the world, aim at a broad (mass-market) readership, and center around a love plot that holds the promise of a future with a unified emotional life for two or more protagonists [...] it is only in the twentieth century that the romance novel emerges as a distinct category of publishing and readership, marked both by textual features (the necessity of a "happy ending" of successful relationship formation) and by the array of paratextual features (cover art, gendered marketing practices, distinctive networks of distribution and reception) that distinguish it both in the public eye and in the eyes of potential readers. That said, inasmuch as the romance novel is a story of successful courtship, the genre has an old and complex history. (2-3)
The database is free to search and I hope it will be of use to people studying popular romance fiction.
I have my own (much neglected) blog on this site and although an index is available of many of the topics and romance novels I have analysed on the Teach Me Tonight academic romance blog, I now post there mainly to publicise new entries in the Romance Scholarship Database.