Dr. Adam Walker is an academic and public-humanities educator with expertise in English and American literature. During the 24/25 academic year, he works as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Literature at Harvard University. He also is delivering lectures and providing writing instruction for Harvard’s Humanities 10 Colloquium. He lives with his wife, Deryn, in Cambridge, MA, where he is at work on his two book projects. Currently on the job market, he is prepared and ready to join a faculty and is excited to assume teaching duties, continue his research, and take up administrative duties that come his way.
As an academic, he specializes in Romantic-era poetry, and his published writings have appeared in The Coleridge Bulletin, North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, The Journal of Scottish Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle. He has presented his research at conferences hosted by Oxford and Cambridge universities, the University of Bristol, the University of Aberdeen, Cornell University, Columbia University, and elsewhere.
His dissertation, “William Wordsworth and the Poetics of Natural Piety,” participates in a new wave of post-secular study of Romantic religion. For the past sixty years, an important strain of scholarship has regarded—and sometimes dismissed—Wordsworth’s verse as a strain of secularism that adopts imitative religious language but avoids a deeper spiritual commitment. His dissertation shatters this consensus, and the implications of its intervention not only induces a new reading of Wordsworth but revitalizes a conversation about poetry and spirituality.
His doctoral study comes out of his expertise as a teacher in the great generalist tradition. As a university educator, at Bucknell and Harvard universities, his teaching has covered rhetoric, public speaking, and critical writing; Shakespeare’s drama and lyric poetry; the Oxford fantasists (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.); aspects of the Bible and English literature; British literature 800 to the present; American literature from 1630 to the present; and lyric poetry from Sappho to Taylor Swift—including Greek, Roman, Italian, German, Chinese, Russian, and some African poetry in translation.
Dr. Walker’s teaching has been recognized by several awards from the Harvard College Office of Undergraduate Education.
As a scholar interested in public-facing education, he founded the Antrim Literature Project, an online public humanities platform where graduate students teach and host free, public lectures. His short-form literary content can be found on his YouTube channel, CloseReadingPoetry. You can support his work and attend live courses with him on Patreon.