Rebecca Hall

Rebecca E. Hall is an MA candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where she is also completing a collaborative specialization with the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Native to New York, Becca is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she earned an honors BA in English Literature in 2023. Her previous literary research considered how the reception of contemporary popular women’s fiction is shaped by a sweeping dismissal of “chick lit” as an intellectually undemanding, special interest subgenre— despite its stylistic evolution of reinvention and current hold on the pulse of mainstream publishing. For future projects, Becca hopes to interrogate the tension between feminism and nostalgia in literary fan cultures to unpack how realism operates in tandem with affect theory to encourage sentimental reactions in readers of historical fiction marketed towards women.