I am studying and reading desert romances. It seems like a lot of folks are recently -- I think I saw a post on your blog about a student looking for responses. I have been working on this project for about three years (I can't believe it's been that long!).

I won't say that I blog, because I am horrible about keeping it up, but you can see some of my thoughts here:

I am interested in telling a more complicated story about desert romances. It seems that most commentary on it takes the orientalist angle to criticize the books and comes from folks who do not actually read any kinds of romance novels, so I want to interrogate that a bit. For example, Erika Wittlieb's comment in the Chicago Tribune article about the fact that desert romances actually speak back to mainstream U.S. images of Arab men (because the desert romances give us positive portrayals) helps to complicate the story that is being told about them.