Walker is the author of Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre:  Bodies, Voices, Words (Cambridge UP 2005).  In it, she offers a new account of American expressionist drama, challenging the traditional critical narrative of German origins by situating it within the context of late-19^th century American culture.  Understanding it in relation to the emergence of new communications technologies (e.g., the telegraph, typewriter, phonograph and silent film), she argues that American dramatic expressionism derives its experimental form from technologies that splintered the act of communication into floating signifiers, disembodied voices and mute bodies gesticulating on screen.  Examining expressionist plays by Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson, and Sophie Treadwell, Walker shows how they gave expression to their playwrights’ fears, desires, and ambivalences about that most embodied of art forms—the theatre—in a moment when the text/performance split was effecting autonomous courses for literary and theatrical modernisms.

Walker is currently working on a second book, Modernity & Performance:  Enacting Socio-Cultural Change on the Western Stage.  In it, she takes a long view of theatrical modernism to examine five distinct styles of acting in relation to five definitive socio-cultural changes that stamped the modern era (e.g., the railroad’s impact on spatio-temporal experience).  Ranging from the Romantic “point” style of acting popularized by David Garrick in the late-18^th century to the violent staging of “self” in contemporary performance art, this book situates each style of performance within the moment of its historical emergence, arguing that actors performing new styles helped their audiences adapt to a changing world by figuring new categories of thought and modeling new habits of social being.

Walker is also the author of several articles, including “Why Performance? Why Now?:  Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Agency” (YJC 2003), an attempt to account for the zeitgeist of critical interest in performance and its metaphors in various disciplines over the past 50 years.