Biography
Born 1979. Cultural critic, literary theorist of modern thought, comparative literature, modern languages and criticism in relation to politics and aesthetics. Studies in comparative literature, modern European thought, French, Japanese, modern languages, and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania (BA, MA 2004), and Cornell University (PhD 2012). Visiting Researcher in Social Theory at Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, 2009-10), Mellon Fellow in Global Aesthetics at the Society for the Humanities (2010-11). Tenure-track assistant professor at McGill University from 2012 to 2017, and tenured associate professor from 2017 to 2023. Faculty Fellow of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (Montréal) in 2016-18 and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Kyoto University) in 2019. Tenured full professor of comparative literature at Cornell University from 2023 to present. Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2025 to present. Member of the editorial boards of Diacritics (Johns Hopkins), the Historical Materialism series (De Gruyter Brill/Haymarket), positions (Duke), and recipient of awards and grants in Canada, Québec, Japan, the UK, and US. Author or editor of 8 books and many articles and chapters in cultural criticism, literary criticism, literature and philosophy, the critical humanities in general.
Research Interests
Having crossed back and forth within the theoretical humanities between the discipline of history and the disciplines of literary or cultural criticism, Walker’s work is inherently interdisciplinary, focusing in the broadest sense on the theoretical meaning of the historical, in the sense that Benedetto Croce once gave to it, a form of analysis ‘suspended between the philosophical and the philological’. This historical-textual nexus of philosophy and philology, central to the foundations of humanistic scholarship, might also be framed as the study of thought in its historical-political conditions and linguistic specificities, using the reading protocols of literary criticism as a method of philosophical, historical, and political investigations.
Ongoing long-term projects include work on the category of historical time and historical discontinuity, the relation of modern thought and the humanities to anti-systemic and emancipatory politics across the global twentieth century, particularly the interwar period, after 1968, and after 1989. the philosophical problem of translation, the history of the theoretical humanities in Canadian and Quebec criticism, the national question after globalisation and the ‘national allegory’; the cultural politics, theory, and philosophy of the humanities as an interdisciplinary whole; the philological and linguistic foundations of humanistic knowledge and 'humane letters' (the junction of literature, philosophy, and history).
Publications
Walker is the author or editor of 8 books. Author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux, 2022), and The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject (Verso, forthcoming), editor of The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 121-4 (Duke, 2022), ‘Ronsô’ no buntai [Styles of ‘the Debate’] (Hôsei, 2023, with Yutaka Nagahara), and the editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020), alongside nearly 70 articles and chapters in the theoretical humanities, critical theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and political thought.
Walker’s work has been supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Japan Foundation (Canada, US, and UK), the Fonds québécois de recherche – société et culture, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including an Insight Grant (2016-2024). Walker served most recently in 2022 as an Invited Humanities Advisor for the Sundance Institute Humanities Sustainability project, sponsored by the Sundance Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities, working to prioritise the importance of the humanities for contemporary cultural production.