Photo courtesy of Ryan Walker
Mount Holyoke Visiting Lecturer in English Katherine Walker
BY DECLAN LANGTON ’22
New visiting lecturer in English, Katherine Walker, loves Shakespeare. Even on a Friday afternoon with no classes to teach, she proudly donned a pair of earrings, which were little replicas of Shakespeare’s first folio. When speaking about Shakespeare, she smiled as if telling a story about an old friend. The more she shared, the more he really seemed to be one. Walker also talked about her dogs — appropriately named Bark Antoni and Lady Macpug — and how they are adjusting to a new life in the Pioneer Valley, just as she is.
It wasn’t until her junior year of high school that Walker became interested in the Bard, and up until then, school didn’t much pique her interest. She grew up in a tiny rural town in Texas, in a home where education wasn’t the emphasis.
“I’m a first generation scholar,” said Walker. She ended up in a program at her high school where struggling students become teacher’s assistants in higher-level classes, “[it was a] small school, they didn’t know what to do with us,” she said. It was through this program that she was introduced to Academic Decathlon; the theme of that year was Shakespeare. “My only job was to sit in this room while the smart kids studied for this event. Through osmosis and through hearing them talk and get excited about texts, I started to get interested in it,” Walker said. She began reading through his plays on her own, but she didn’t tell any of her friends. “They would’ve called me a nerd… I was a secret Shakespearean.”
She brought this newfound passion to the University of North Texas. She took every literature class possible, with an emphasis on Shakespeare’s plays. Walker then knew she wanted to attend graduate school. She joined the McNair Scholars Program which provides money to interested first generation college students and students from minority backgrounds so they can attend graduate programs and participate in research. The program brought her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was matched with a mentor.
“He was a Religious Studies professor,” Walker said, “and we read Shakespeare together.” Through these studies began an investigation into how bodies and early modern race were represented in Shakespeare’s plays and in the 16th century.
Although teaching wasn’t on her mind during graduate school, it fell into place the more she realized that Shakespeare was applicable to today’s society.
“We are so saturated with pre-modern literature… that anyone you read today is somehow responding to these earlier works,” said Walker. According to Walker, even the author of the Harry Potter Series, J.K. Rowling, “is responding to Macbeth in some ways [with] the stereotype of the witch, the idea of magic as evil or secret.”
Walker took another, deeper dive, hoping to broaden her Shakespeare horizons. She started by researching science of the 16th century, which brought her to medicine and back to bodies, but it also introduced her to magic. “It kept coming into the conversation,” she said. “What we think of as science… of the period, was actually much more in flux and much open to what we today would call magic.” So-called sciences such as astrology were used by people to make decisions to lead their lives. “Is that a science, or is that magic?” Walker asks, but answers from the time are so blurred it’s nearly impossible to differentiate.
Of course there is the other side to magic, the side most are familiar with: conjuring demons, bewitching lovers and predicting the future. Walker is more than happy to study that side of magic as well. “It’s not just a lower-class witch believing in magic, it’s the king of the nation… it’s everyone,” she explained, “what we would call magic… they would’ve called it worldview.” For Walker, this makes the study of Shakespeare even more interesting and diverse, “It allows for a lot of different voices to participate in magic,” she added. These voices include women, who often in Shakespeare’s plays took the roles of witches and healers. Today, those seeds of magic and Shakespeare’s ideas and plot are being reworked today by young writers into new books, plays and movies to showcase those previously unheard voices.
“There is a whole diverse group of individuals who are taking the seeds that… other authors gave us, but then creating something entirely new, exciting, important, in a way that transforms our field of understanding,” said Walker.
Finding something that promotes interest within those plays can take time — Walker knows that. “Once you step away from your high school experiences with it and make it your own… read what you want to read. I think, hopefully, it transforms,” she said. When students bring their own interests to class, she tries to find ways to help them make comparisons between the topics and enrich their thinking. This is just one of the ways she hopes to mimic what her mentors have done for her.
“My emphasis is really on serving as a mentor to students,” she said, and that “students from all sorts of backgrounds [can] reach out to faculty — to seek advice, seek research opportunities, share as much as you can what your intended goals are.” She stressed this importance again and again, as it was something she wished she had done in college. Her advice is to “use the faculty as much as you can,” because help is out there.