Dr. Michelle BOULOUS WALKER's research interests span the fields of European philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and feminist philosophy. Her teaching interests in philosophy include intersections with politics, film, and literature. Her recent research in Slow Philosophy engages with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Theodore W. Adorno, Luce Irigraray, Michèle Le Doeuff, and others. A new project focuses on questions of philosophy and the politics of laughter.
Her other activities include:
Head: European Philosophy Research Group (EPRG) affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).
"Both my teaching and research focus on the practice of philosophy – its historical, disciplinary, and institutional dimensions. I have published two monographs . The first, Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (Routledge: London & New York, 1998), explores the complex exclusions that keep women’s voices silent within the history of Western philosophy. The second, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic: 2017), explores the challenge of time pressure on learning, pedagogy, and research in philosophy, and more broadly in the humanities. In these works, I explore the internal threats to philosophy (its blind spots, exclusions, and silences) and it external threats (the demands of the digital age). I am interested to work within the institution of philosophy to engage these challenges. In a series of book chapters and international journal articles I have pursued this ethical examination of philosophy. I inquire into the effect of philosophy’s exclusions in order to make it a more inclusive intellectual domain, and I explore strategies that help philosophers respond more creatively to the pressures of the modern academy. I combine an engagement with the traditional questions and methods of philosophy with an investigation of the implications of these for contemporary issues of human agency and human knowledge."
Dr Walters has published on Cavendish, Shakespeare, and Renaissance women in relation to science, philosophy, gender, sexuality and political thought. She welcomes research proposals relating to these topics.
She is author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, hardback 2014, paperback 2017) and is co-editor of Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won Co-Honorable Mention for the 2022 Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Dr Walters is also one of the joint editors of the Restoration section of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing.
Her edition, The Blazing World and other Writings, is forthcoming with Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is currently co-editing Cavendish and Milton, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Dr Walters is also Deputy Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS).
She obtained her doctorate and masters degree from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and her BA from the University of California Santa Cruz. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. She has also held academic positions in England, America, and Scotland and was a visiting professor at Université Catholique de Lille, France. Between studies, she worked in Tokyo, Japan.
In 2016 she won a Teaching and Innovation Award from Liverpool Hope University, UK and has served on the Education Committee for Shakespeare North, a world-class Jacobean replican theatre in England.
Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, Anthem Press, and was President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society. She is the founder and managing editor of Margaret Cavendish: A Multidisciplinary Journal.
