Shelf Love
Shelf Love
What's Love Got To Do With It? Quite A Bit!

Shelf Love is a podcast and community that explores fictional stories of romantic love across media, time, and cultures. For the curious and open-minded who joyfully question as they consume pop culture.

Latest Episodes


  • What makes a heroine in romance, a genre invested in exploring how can women be happy in culture? Is the genre a place where heroines create integrated identities that reject binaries of what society tells them to be? Dr. Jayashree Kamble discusses her latest book on romance scholarship, Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation. Shelf Love listeners can use “UShelfLove” to get 35% off the book at Indiana University Press, from now until November 2, 2023.

  • Four romance reading friends embark on a romance history reading project, based on a BookRiot list, and in this episode, two of them — Leigh Kramer and Hannah Hearts romance — have Flames on the Sides of their Face when talking about the Flame and The Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. To keep things interesting, we talk less about the book itself and more about questions of reader reception and the relationship between the 1972 text and the romance texts that followed. Have we come a long way, baby, or are we still wallowing in the same whirlpool of sludgey emotions?

  • What happens when 35 romance scholars walk into a bar, after hours at the IASPR 2023 Romance Revitalised conference? They share their favorite romance scholarship, and why!

  • The fabulous foursome (Morgan & Isabeau from Whoa!mance, Dame Jodie Slaughter, Andrea Martucci from Shelf Love) get meta textual as we reflect on our meta podcasting project on Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas. What’s this episode about? Take a guess from this collection of possible episode titles: - Panopticon Alert: Meta Reflections on Dreaming of You - The Internet Killed Romance - Whoa! That’s Some Weird Romance - Our Current Romance Panopticon - Alienating Persons in Romance - Love Us or Hate Us - Here We Are Now, Offend Us - Did you enjoy this podcast? Be sure to listen to episode 140 and 141 before diving into the meta-ness and meta-mess of this text.

All Episodes

Latest Blog Posts


Read More

Reviews