With such topics lining up for discussion as "Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic", "The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction" and "The Thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer", how could I resist? I first started reading Heyer's Regency romances when I was about 13, burying myself in my mother's old, battered copies, loving her beautiful but spirited heroines – often wearing "cascades of guinea-gold hair", which at the time I felt had something to do with guinea pigs – and her stern-but-kind, masterful heroes.

They are still the books I turn to when I'm in need of comfort reading (and Horry, she of the big eyebrows and the stammer in A Convenient Marriage, is still my favourite) so I shall definitely be visiting Cambridge's Lucy Cavendish College in November, where they're holding a one-day conference on re-reading Georgette Heyer. Will it spoil the books for me? Will they hold up to such close scrutiny? I don't know, but I want to find out.

Heyer isn't the only author with a conference to her name this autumn: we've just missed the first, on David Mitchell, which St Andrews held at the end of last week. Discussions included "Intertextual Doppelganger: David Mitchell's number9dream and Japan", and "A Portrait of the Young Man as an Escape Artist", and Mitchell himself even put in an appearance, reading to delegates and taking questions. And in July, Imogen Russell-Williams enjoyed a weekend-long conference on the works of Diana Wynne Jones.

I shall report back on the Heyer conference once I've been, but are there any authors out there who would tempt you back into the lecture hall? Ian McEwan, perhaps? JM Coetzee? Salman Rushdie? Of course, if it's JK Rowling you're after, your choice is legion.