Biography
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 at Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, 2009-10), Mellon Fellow in Global Aesthetics at the Society for the Humanities (2010-11). 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.
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 (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 modern languages, the theoretical humanities, cultural and critical theory, literary criticism, politics and aesthetics.
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.