Collegiate Postdoc in American Culture
Dr. Walker’s manuscript, Her Kitchen is The World: Black Women and the Culture of Soul Food traces the construction of soul food using cookbooks, USDA narrative reports, television, and film. The project conceptualizes soul food as a battleground for Black representation within popular culture. These contestations often play out through representations of Black womanhood and domestic space. Her Kitchen Is the World finds that these images often implicate shifting ideologies of citizenship and national belonging, race, nutrition, and gendered divisions of labor.
Walker’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is very much reflected in her pedagogy. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes engaged and responsive one-on-one mentoring and creating space for a range of diverse voices both in content and classroom discussion. She works with students and faculty to not only expand how race and gender are analyzed in studies of food, space, and identity but to also mentor and support underrepresented student populations. As a mentor, faculty instructor, and fellow for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, she has dedicated her professional career to attending to the importance and value of diversifying institutions of higher education.
