Profile
Gina Luria Walker is an intellectual historian who investigates alternatives to traditional accounts of the past. She is the Director of The Center for The New Historia, recently launched at The New School, whose mission is to present authoritative, multidisciplinary scholarship on women’s contributions to society, to broadcast these stories on a pioneering, interactive platform and at public events, and to reveal an alternative history that values the roles women have always played in human endeavors. Dr. Walker is a pioneer in the global project of feminist historical recovery of earlier women.
Her interests include the struggles of female intellectuals to be educated outside the male-only institutions of teaching and learning and recognized in the Republic of Letters; and the diffusion of the Reformation concept of “the right to private judgment” as a pivotal force in the withering of absolutism in church and state. Dr. Walker also explores the emergence of “the rights of man” and the conflict over efforts to apply these to women, the working class, People of Color, colonists, and Jews. She is the Editor of the Chawton House Library edition of Female Biography (1803) by Mary Hays, a six-volume work documenting the lives of 302 active, learned, and rebellious women, which Jane Austen is known to have read and may have used in writing her novels. To produce the new edition, Dr. Walker assembled an international team of 164 scholars, representing 116 institutions in eighteen countries.
Degrees Held
PhD, New York University
Recent Publications
Editor, The Invention of Female Biography (Chawton House Studies in Scholarly Editing, 2017), essays by fourteen scholars from The Female Biography Project.
Co-Editor, Women’s Writing, special issue on Female Biography, Spring, 2017;
“I sought and made for myself an extraordinary destiny,” Women’s Writing, 2017.
Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries (1803). Chawton House Library Series: Women's Memoirs, ed. Gina Luria Walker, Memoirs of Women Writers Part II (Pickering & Chatto: London, 2013, 2014) in six volumes.
"The Two Marys: Hays Writes Wollstonecraft," Called to Civil Existence: Mary Wollstonecraft's The Rights of Woman, ed. Enit K. Steiner, Dialogue Series, Rodophi Press, Amsterdam, 2014, pp. 49-70.
“Intellectual Exchanges: Women and Rational Dissent,” in special issue, Enlightenment and Dissent, (2010) (co-editor)
“Women’s Voices,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (2010)
Rational Passions: Women and Scholarship in Britain, 1702–1870 (2008) (co-editor)
Mary Hays (1759–1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (2006)
The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader (2005)
“Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005)
“‘Can Man Be Free/And Woman Be a Slave?’ Teaching Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in Intersecting Communities,” in Teaching British Women Writers 1750–1900 (2005)
Research Interests
The lives of attested women, the history of learned women, the feminist intellectual tradition, , self-writing, the diffusion of the concept of the right to private judgment, the gendering of knowledge, the permeability of genre.
Awards And Honors
2014- Member, International Advisory Board, UDC International Doctoral School, Universidade Da Coruña,Spain
2013- Advisory Editorial Board, Enlightenment and Dissent, Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary University of London