Biography
Selected Courses Taught at Penn State:
Senior Seminar: The Literature of Imperialism, ENGL 487W
The Victorians, ENGL 452
Great Traditions in English Literature, ENGL 002
Literature and Empire, ENGL 182A
Honors Freshman Composition, ENGL 30
Authors and Contexts: The Victorians and Race, ENGL 400
British Literature from 1798, ENGL 222
The Victorian Novel, ENGL 453
Writing in the Humanities, ENGL 202B
Selected Invited Speaker Engagements:
Oxford University -- Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar: “The ‘Sallow Mr Freely’: Sugar, Appetite and Unstable Forms of Whiteness in George Eliot’s ‘"Brother Jacob”” (March 2022)
Rutgers British Studies Center: “How Victorianists Might Talk about Race,” Roundtable Speaker (February 2022)
The Virtual Dickens Universe: “Toppling Statues- Teaching Victorian Literature in 2020” (July 2020)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA): Anti-Racism in British 19th Century Studies (August 2020)
Rutgers Nineteenth-Century Studies Group: “Blackness and Affect in the Nineteenth Century” (November 2020)
Selected Grants and Awards:
Outstanding Teaching Award, Tenure Line, 2022
Drum Major for Justice Award, 2022 (From the Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion)
Seeding Change Grant, 2019
Ghana Study Abroad Exploratory Grant, 2019
Doctoral Thesis Completion Award, 2010-2011
William and Mary Burgan Prize, awarded for “Outstanding Presentation by Graduate Student at
the Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference,” 2010
Viola Whitney Pratt Scholarship, 2009-2010
SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, 2005-2008
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2005-2006
SSHRC Master’s Scholarship, 2004-2005
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2004-2005
Margeson Scholarship in English, 2002-2003
Oxford University Press Essay Prize, 2002-2003
McClelland & Stewart Essay Prize in Canadian Studies, 2002-2003
Click photo to read "Journey to Ghana is life-changing for two Abington faculty"
Research Interests
Dr Walters’ interdisciplinary research investigates representations of race and racial mixture in the nineteenth century. She has published on race and affect, and her writing focuses on the intertwined histories of scientific and emotional conceptions of race—particularly as they are focalized through depictions of people of color in Victorian fiction.
Dr Walters also writes about colonial and literary depictions of food, as she considers what Victorians wrote about food and the dynamic process of national identity formation. Dr Walters teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, the Caribbean, and writing at Penn State Abington.
Publications
"Affective Liberalisms: Brown Caribbean Feeling and Liberal Futures, 1830-1901." In-Progress book manuscript.
"Liberal Sympathy & Unseeing the 'black-blue' body in Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch." 9800 words. Under review.
“Afterword: Irish Racial Ambivalence and White Supremacy in the Colonial Caribbean.” Race, Violence, and Form: The Referent of Ireland. Eds. Mary L. Mullen and Renee Fox. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 4600 words. Forthcoming
“‘When I came back, it was … to the love of a new generation’: Affective Genealogies of Race in Dinah Craik’s The Half-Caste.” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s. Ed. by Gail Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 45-68. 7500 words.
"Whiteness in Victorian Literature." Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature. (2023).
“James Hunt, Robert Knox, and the Feelings of Empirical Race Science.” Victorian Studies vol. 64, no. 4, 2022, pp. 554-560.
Walters, Alisha. “'The Sallow Mr. Freely': Sugar, Diet and White Racial Anxiety in George Eliot's 'Brother Jacob'.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol 50, no. 3 (2022), pp. 1-30.
“We find nowadays perpetual disenchantment on the score of cookery”: Domestic French Cooking, Victorian Travel Writing, and British Nationality. Victorian Review, Vol. 47, no. 2 (2022), pp. 225-42.
“‘The Tears I could not repress, rolling down my brown cheeks’: Mary Seacole, Feeling, and the Imperial Body,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 16, no. 1 (2020). 9000 words.
“A ‘white boy…who is not a white boy’: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Whiteness, and British Identity.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 46, no. 2 (2018): 331-346.
“Affective Hybridities: Dinah Craik’s Olive and British Heterogeneity.” Women’s Writing, 20, no. 2 (2013): 325-43.
“The English Language and Nigerian Prose Fiction,” University of Toronto April (2007)
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Toronto
M.A. English, University of Toronto
B.A. English and French, University of Toronto. Graduated with High Distinction.