Hanna (Netta) Baker

Netta Baker is an advanced instructor of English at Virginia Tech. Her research passions include political and religious rhetoric, and popular romance. Oddly, she has worked as both an LSAT writing tutor and an erotic romance ghostwriter after her dreams of becoming a Las Vegas dancer were thoroughly dashed.

She teaches courses in first-year writing and rhetoric, as well as popular romance with a focus on “romantasy” and the BookTok/Bookstagram phenomenon. She believes popular romance is literature, please feel free to enquire for details and prepare for a lengthy explanation.

Netta’s devotion to popular romance began in a barn in 1997 alongside a goat and fifteen chickens. Having attempted to order the piano sheet music for Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” from her public library, she instead found herself in possession of Yvonne Lehman’s A Whole New World, a Heartsong Presents series romance (#201!) from 1984. The light from yonder window breaking was, of course, the popular romance and the rest as they say, was history.

Her current research investigates the impact of BookTok/Bookstagram on the genre’s parameters, heat-leveling, and social acceptability. Her other long-term continuing projects include the therapeutic nature of dark romance, romance reading as a subversive act, and the innovative impact of novelist Patricia Veryan on genre standards including dual point of view, the strategic reforming of a rake, and the shared universe of characters– Step aside Georgette Heyer, Patricia Veryan would like to challenge you for the title “Mother of Modern Romance!”

In her spare time, Netta enjoys time with her family and menagerie, searching for duskwalkers in the woods, reading romance, talking about romance, writing romance, and plotting to acquire a small horde of goats.