Rebecca L. Fall

Dr. Rebecca L. Fall is a public humanities administrator and a scholar of premodern studies. After receiving her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, Rebecca completed a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellowship at The Public Theater in NYC, leading a large-scale audience research and communications project. She currently works as a Program Manager in the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, and serves as a PreAmble Scholar at Chicago Shakespeare Theater doing audience engagement work. Rebecca also maintains an active scholarly profile. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the 2017 J. Leeds Barroll Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America, and her work has appeared in SEL, Shakespeare Studies, and edited collections from Arden, Palgrave, and Edinburgh University Press. She is presently completing an academic book project entitled Common Nonsense: The Social Use of Not Making Sense in Early Modern England, which traces the surprising social functions of nonsense writing in early modern England against a longer history of culturally productive (and destructive) senselessness from eleventh-century France to the U.S. today.