Biography
I am currently a Research Associate with the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology in the School of Divinity and a Modern Humanities Research Association Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Modern Languages.
I received my MA in French and Italian and MLitt in Italian Studies from the University of St Andrews, respectively in 2016 and 2017. In 2021 I was awarded a PhD in Italian from St Andrews, the research for which was funded by the Carnegie Trust.
Teaching
IT1001: Introduction to Italian Language
IT1002: Italian Language (Elementary)
IT1004: Italian Language Intermediate II
IT2002: Second Level Italian (Advanced)
IT1013: Italian Geographies
IT1014: Italian Histories
IT4033: Elena Ferrante
CO1002: Drama in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
ML5010: Problems of Culture and Identity 1
ML5020: Literary and Cultural Theory 1
Research areas
My personal research is focused on twentieth and twenty-first century women's writing across languages, with a particular concentration on Italian. My doctoral research examined the motif of fragmentation in the novels of Elena Ferrante and Goliarda Sapienza, arguing that the contributions of women writers are central to a broader canon of male-authored fragmentated narratives in Italy which includes modernist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern texts. I have published in Italianist and comparatist contexts on subjectivity in the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Sally Rooney and am presently preparing my doctoral thesis for publication.
Most recently, I am interested in how scholarship in Italian Studies can better account for the theological dimensions of modern Italian literature and am undertaking new research on responses to Roman Catholicism among Italian women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Selected publications
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Open access
"Una metamorfosi straordinaria": emotional epistemologies in "Lo scialle andaluso" and La Storia
Walker, R., 1 Nov 2024, In: Annali d'Italianistica. 42, p. 379-404 26 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Compliant and impetuous: the phenomenology of existence in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels
Leung, K.-H. & Walker, R., 2024, In: Textual Practice. 38, 5, p. 789–807Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Conference report: 'Covid and the woman writer'
Walker, R., 1 Mar 2022, In: Journal of Romance Studies. 22, 1, p. 183-187 5 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Mean girls and melancholics: insidious trauma in 'The Lying Life of Adults' by Elena Ferrante and 'Conversations with Friends' by Sally Rooney
Walker, R., 1 Dec 2022, Trauma narratives in Italian and transnational women's writing. de Rogatis, T. & Wehling-Giorgi, K. (eds.). Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, p. 335-358 24 p. (Collana studi e ricerche; vol. 129).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
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Pains, Pens, and Poets: Review of Elena Ferrante's "In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing"
Moro, C. & Walker, R. M., 2022, Reading In Translation.Research output: Other contribution
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Open access
A language of her own: willful displacement and nomadic subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri
Walker, R. M., 1 Mar 2021, In: Contemporary Women's Writing. 15, 1, p. 105–122 18 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Picking up the pieces: Elena Ferrante's global poetics of fracture
Walker, R. M., Jan 2021, In: MLN. 136, 1, p. 75-95 20 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Time Out of Joint: Sandro Veronesi's "The Hummingbird", Translated From Italian by Elena Pala
Walker, R. M., 2021, Reading In Translation.Research output: Other contribution
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Bringing up the bodies: material encounters in Elsa Morante's La Storia
Walker, R. M., 28 Oct 2020, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Italian Studies. Latest ArticlesResearch output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review