Netta Baker is an Advanced Instructor of English at Virginia Tech. Her research examines popular romance and romantasy through rhetorical, historical, and ethical frameworks, with particular attention to public discourse surrounding women's reading practices, sexuality, and performative feminism. 

Her scholarly work situates contemporary romance within the legacy of the sexual revolution, analyzing how trauma narratives, moral regulation, and systems of power shape evolving genre conventions and the cultural reception of women who read and write within them. She is especially interested in dark romance as a site of systems-based ethical reasoning, neurodivergent cognition, and non-normative models of desire, consent, and survival. 

She teaches courses in first-year writing and rhetoric, as well as popular romance and romantasy, with a focus on BookTok/Bookstagram, genre boundaries, and evolving reader norms. 

Writing fiction under the name Violet R. Jackson, Baker is the author of the dark fantasy romance series A Dance With Darkness Visible, which explores power, inevitability, and containment, and the destabilizing consequences of fated bonds. Her creative and academic work remain in close dialogue, each informing her analysis of narrative, morality, and systems of control.