Professor, Film and Media Studies

Janet Walker holds a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles and is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Feminist Studies and the Comparative Literature Program. She is also co-convenor of the Environmental Media Initiative Research Group of the Carsey-Wolf Center. With research specializations including documentary film and media, trauma and memory studies, and media and environment, Walker is author of four books Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry; Feminism and Documentary; Westerns: Films through History; and Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, and also recently co-edited with Bhaskar Sarkar, Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. Turning towards spatial media studies, Walker is co-organizer of the 2012-13 theme, “Figuring Sea Level Rise,” of the campus’s Critical Issues in America series. She has been engaging in site-specific research in Israel-Palestine and in post-Katrina New Orleans for a book about media and geography. Walker is the recipient of grants from the California Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and of a Distinguished Teaching Award from UCSB in 2001.

Select EH Courses: Film and Media of the Natural and Human Environment, Media and Geography, and Imaging and Imagining Sea Level Rise