Gina Luria Walker is professor emerita of women's studies and director of a web-based resource about women called The New Historia. She teaches women's intellectual history, and is an expert on eighteenth-century feminist intellectual Mary Hays and her circle. Walker produced the first contemporary scholarly edition of Hays's major work, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries.
Walker's focus is recovering lost contributions of women. In 2015, Walker worked with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum to direct Project Continua, a website of female biographies. Her latest work in recovering women displaced from the historical record is The New Historia, a project that is an encyclopedia of female networks and intellectual contributions. The project launched online in March 2022. Her collaborator on this project is information architect Lisa Strausfeld, and together their vision is to create a "Google Earth for knowledge."
Walker has held faculty appointments at Rutgers University, Northwestern University (as the Assistant Director of the Program on Women), and as a Guest Facility at Sarah Lawrence College. Walker retired from The New School after 32 years and is now Professor Emerita of Women's Studies.
Biography Gina Luria Walker received her Ph.D. in 18th Century Literature from New York University, where she was awarded the Founders' Day Award for doctoral studies. These included her discovery of primary documents by and about Mary Hays (1759–1843) in private hands, now part of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library. Her areas of research include the history of learned women, women and Rational Dissent, late Enlightenment Feminisms, and women's autodidactic production of new knowledge.
Walker is a member of the International Advisory Board, UDC International Doctoral School, Universidade da Coruña, Spain and on the Advisory Editorial Board, Enlightenment and Dissent, Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary University of London. She is involved in encouraging new Wikipedia encyclopedia articles on historical women and is an authority on historical encyclopedias.
Education and Doctoral Research Walker completed her undergraduate work at Barnard College and earned her master's degree in English Literature at Columbia University.
Walker's interest in feminist historical recovery crystallized during a required Novel course at Barnard College when she was an undergraduate. In the course, Walker read George Eliot novel Middlemarch (1871), where she found Eliot's portrayal of Tertius Lygate's scientific "intellectual passion" to describe her interest in documenting women as missing historical figures. Walker also read F. R. Leavis's literary criticism, The Great Tradition (1948), in which he credited Jane Austen as the sole precursor to George Eliot's work. Given her interest in the "epistemological authority of women as historical subjects," Walker was hesitant to believe Leavis's reductionist claim.
At Columbia, where she pursued a Master's Degree, she intended to study the writer Jane Austen, placing her in the intellectual spectrum of the late Enlightenment. The graduate student adviser discouraged her by saying, "All you Barnard girls want to write about Austen. There is nothing more to be learned about Jane Austen." The professor directed Walker to write her thesis on the personal writings of James Boswell using his recently discovered journals as source material, viewed through the prism of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Her advisor praised her thesis but told her she was "too pretty to bother getting a Ph.D." and advised her to "go home and get married."
Greatly discouraged, she applied to New York University to pursue doctoral research. She explained to the Graduate Advisor more carefully that she wanted to study "a highly self-conscious woman on the margins of the late Enlightenment".She had the good fortune to be introduced to Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908–1994), an Oxford-trained scholar and expert on Percy Bysshe Shelley, who became her dissertation director. Cameron agreed that she could study Jane Austen. It was he who first encouraged her to visit the New York Public Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, of which he was the founding director, to see what information was available about Mary Hays. What she found "changed [her] life."
Mary Hays
After researching the available material on Mary Hays in the Pforzheimer Library, Walker received a grant from the Pforzheimer to meet with the owner of Hays's private correspondence in London. The owner was reluctant to share them because she understood Hays as a controversial feminist figure during her lifetime who wrote about illicit passion and "even suicide!" Her writing was criticized for questioning the inequality of the sexes, and she was personally attacked for pursuing knowledge (historically, a male occupation) and being homely. In 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to her as "a Thing, ugly and petticoated."
Eventually, the owner of the letters allowed Walker to view the 115 private letters to and from Hays in correspondence with Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey, Eliza Fenwick and others. In her 2018 essay "I Sought & Made to Myself an Extraordinary Destiny," Walker describes the relationship between a female scholar and her subject. Amid contemporaneous "textual sabotage" that depicted Hays as unpleasant and sexually immoral, Walker recounts the journey to redefine Hays's legacy through her revolutionary accomplishments. Walker's experience with Hays was complicated:
"While I wanted to understand, empathize with, and defend Hays, her authorial self was so unlike the wise, steady persona presented by Austen's narrators that had inspired me, that I, too, could not warm to her. She was angry, self-pitying, narcissistic, filled with resentment and yearning. Her unquiet spirit struggled against the tide of responses to her as unlovely, abrasive, and unlovable, confirmation that no respectable man would want her. Studying Hays seemed to take me further away from the apparently safe, hallowed shores of the Canon. I felt adrift; as an uncredentialled female autodidactic, Hays offered no safety."
In 1972, Walker earned a doctorate for her work on Mary Hays, for which she received NYU's highest academic honor, The Founder's Day Award. Hays' biographies of historical women struck Walker; she wondered why Hays undertook them, departing from her earlier philosophical work. Hays had been a close friend of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. When Wollstonecraft died from complications of childbirth in 1797, Hays mourned her death by compiling biographies of 302 iconoclastic women. It was one of the earliest instances of feminist historical recovery.
Hays wrote to channel her pain and fortify herself by documenting the struggles and accomplishments of great female thinkers of the past. It was one of the earliest instances of feminist historical recovery. Hays wrote an Obituary of Wollstonecraft, unsigned (Letter to the Editor, Monthly Magazine 4 [September 1797], 232-33). "Quick to feel, and indignant to resist the iron hand of despotism, whether civil or intellectual, her exertions to awaken in the minds of her oppressed sex a sense of their degradation, and to restore them to the dignity of reason and virtue, were active and incessant: by her impassioned reasoning and glowing eloquence, the fabric of voluptuous prejudice has been shaken to its foundation, and totters towards its fall: while her philosophic mind, taking a wider range, perceived and lamented in the defects of civil institutions, interwoven in their texture, and inseparable from them, the causes of those partial evils, destructive to virtue and happiness, which poison social intercourse and deform domestic life."
Hays's instinct to document the lives of neglected historical women inspired the trajectory of Walker's career.
Walker has written and edited numerous books and articles regarding Mary Hays, including The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays's Reader (as editor, Broadview Press, 2006), Mary Hays: The Growth of a Woman's Mind (Ashgate, 2006, reissued by Routledge in 2018), The Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays's Female Biography; or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries, 6 vols. (as editor, Pickering & Chatto, 2013, 2014), and Mary Hays's 'Female Biography': Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism (with Mary Spongberg, Routledge, 2019).
Academic work Female Biography Project In 2009, the editorial board of the library at Chawton House - an estate once owned Jane Austen's brother that now supports the recovery of early women's writing - commissioned Walker to reproduce Mary Hays's Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, Of All Ages and Countries (1803). Walker's edition was released in 2013 and 2014 by Pickering & Chatto Publishers.
In order to re-create Hays' work with the new evidence available, Walker established a network of 200 scholars. Working under the name Female Biography Project, they recovered historical material about women.
The Invention of Female Biography (2019) Source:
The Invention of Female Biography contains essays from 14 members of the Female Biography Project (FBP) and documents the international scholarly collaboration that produced Walker's groundbreaking contribution to feminist historical recovery. Between 2009 and 2014, 168 scholars across 18 countries participated in the FBP, an unprecedented mission that created the Chawton House Library edition of Mary Hays's Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries (1803).
The project assembled scholars, volunteers, and specialists in women's history. It used new knowledge, interdisciplinary communication, and a dedicated project website to revive and expand Hays's pioneering work, which included more than 300 entries. Walker's 2018 book "brings together essays that describe, elucidate and conceptualize the exhaustive research, unique editorial challenges and innovative responses of participants in the FBP."
The research generated has developed our understanding of Hays's contribution to women's history. In the process, it became apparent that there was more that might be learned from the study of Hays's text and other similar experiments in the space between women's history and women's life writing.
The Invention of Female Biography underscores the complexities of editing a female autodidact's work amid the misogynistic traditions, both through personal and cultural lenses. Brimming with vibrant perspectives, the essayists examine Hays's exploration of queenship (Spongberg and Woodacre), the abundance of classical women within her corpus (Plant), the Google digitization of missing resources (Whipp), and other rich subject matter. The contributors ponder whether perspectives and inaccuracies throughout Hays's oeuvre are symptomatic of the culture in which she lived—often, like the individuals she documented, Hays was forced to navigate gendered, linguistic, and male-centric epistemological barriers. Further, the scholars contemplate Hays's research process, writing strategies, and her access to sources of historical women "missing in action" (Woodacre).