Katherine Walker is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She works on the histories of magic, science, and drama, turning often to almanacs, demonology, and books of secrets in her research. Her book Instinct, Knowledge and Occult Science on the Early Modern English Stage is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. The book examines embodied knowledge on the early modern stage, with chapters on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, among others. This work engages with recent work in environmental humanities, the medical humanities, science studies, and performance studies in order to make a case for the important role of instinct in challenging dominant humoral and scientific frameworks. As she argues, early modern instinct was a concept that allowed authors to play with, and often contest, the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate forms of inquiry, particularly when scientific investigation entailed studying the occult influences of the cosmos.
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Walker is the author of Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary (Bloomsbury 2021). She is co-editor with Sarah Dustagheer and Kirk Melnikoff of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Christopher Marlowe. Her work appears in the journals: Prose Studies, Comitatus, Early Modern Literary Studies, Studies in Philology, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, English Literary History, Marlowe Studies, English Literary Renaissance, and Literature Compass, Cashiers de Recherches, and Shakespeare. She has co-edited a special issue of postmedieval titled “Prophetic Futures” which was published as an edited collection with Joseph Bowling titled Prophetic Futures with Palgrave Macmillan.
