For as long as there has been film, there has been romance on film. Whether tragic or comedic, watching stories of love blossom, unfold, and sometimes go tragically awry, we are fascinated with stories about love relationships. These relationships are themselves open to variation, be they between heterosexual couples or LGBTQ couples or even as expressed through non-monogamous pluralities (for instance, in romances about polygamy) or in non-sexual bonds between parent and child or between citizen and country. In this class, we will consider the genre of the romance quite capaciously, thinking through the lens provided by romantic comedy and dramatic romance as articulated in, through, and between the many countries we experience on our voyage. Our investigation will take us from the most popular film ever made in Shanghai to the arranged marriages of Bollywood to the forced orphanages of Dublin, each site seeking to understand how a nation, person, and place co-articulate through an expression of love.

Field Work