My name is Leila (lee-EYE-la) Walker, and I study the intersection of the material and ephemeral as it emerges in British Romantic literature and contemporary digital projects. I received my PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2015.

My book manuscript-in-progress, Romantic Touch: Ephemeral Gestures and Material Remains in British Romanticism, focuses on the social experience of tactility as a means of exploring the often porous boundary between self and other in both literature and acts of material culture. This project draws on archival research and it is grounded in the theoretical approaches of haptics that have recently emerged in the digital humanities.

My publications include “Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Ekphrasis of Hair” (European Romantic Review, April 2013), “The Child of the City and the ‘Palimpsest’ at Sea: De Quincey’s Chronological Constraints” (Literature Compass, October 2012), and “Ghosts in the House: Margaret Oliphant’s Uncanny Response to Feminist Success” (in Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, ed. Tamara Wagner,  Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009). When I am not working on academic projects, I am usually cooking vegan food, climbing rocks, and running far.