Claire Walker is an Associate Investigator at The University of Adelaide. Claire is a scholar of early modern religion, gender, politics and emotion. She has written extensively about exiled English convents in France, the Southern Netherlands and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As part of an ARC funded project on moral panics, she considered the ways that fears about the threat Catholics posed church, state and society were represented in the media. Claire is currently completing an ARC Centre for the History of Emotions project, 'Governing Emotion: The Affective family, the Press and the Law in Early Modern Britain', with Professor David Lemmings and Dr Katie Barclay; and researching a new project on the 'Materiality of Religious Exile in Early Modern English Convents'.
Contact
claire.i.walker@adelaide.edu.au
University of Adelaide Staff Profile
Research
Governing Emotions: the Affective Family, the Press and the Law in Early Modern Britain
Selected Publications
Lemmings, D., C. Walker and K. Barclay, eds. A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age (1600–1780). Volume 4 of A Cultural History of The Emotions. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Walker, C. ‘The Experience of Exile in Early Modern English Convents’. Parergon 34.2 (2017): 159–77.
Walker, C. ‘Governing Bodies, Family and Society: The Rhetoric of the Passions in the Sermons of Samuel Wesley’. English Studies 98.7 (2017): 733–46.
Walker, C. ‘Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early Modern English Convents’. In Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200‒1920: Family, State and Church, edited by M. L. Bailey and K. Barclay, pp. 221‒39. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Walker, C. ‘Monastic Communities’. In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by S. Broomhall, pp. 277‒80. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
Walker, C. ‘Exiled Children: Care in English Convents in the 17th and 18th Centuries’. Children Australia 41.3 (2016): 168–77.
Walker, C. and H. Kerr, eds. ‘Fama’ and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
Walker, C. ‘Whispering Fama: Talk and Reputation in Early Modern Society’. In ‘Fama’ and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe, edited by H. Kerr and C. Walker, pp. 9–35. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
Walker, C. ‘An Ordered Cloister? Dissenting Passions in Early Modern English Cloisters’. In Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder, edited by S. Broomhall, pp. 197–214. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Walker, C. ‘”When God shall Restore them to their Kingdoms”: Nuns, Exiled Stuarts and English Catholic Identity, 1688–1745'. In Religion and Women in Britain, c.1660–1760, edited by S. Apetrei and H. Smith, pp. 79–98. London: Routledge, 2014.
Selected Presentations
Seminar: '"Hangd for the true faith": Martyrs and Relics in an Early Modern Cloister', The University of Adelaide (UAdel), 28 May 2018.
Symposium Paper: ‘The Convent and the City: Sacred Space and Domestic Spaces in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, ‘Mapping the Emotional Cityscape: Spaces, Performances and Emotion in Urban Life’ CHE symposium, UAdel, 18 September 2017.
Keynote Lecture: ‘“The martyer of mortification”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters’, ‘Devotion, Gender and the Body’ symposium, Monash University, Australia, 18–19 August 2017.
Seminar Paper: ‘Affect, Gender, Inequality and Heterosexuality’, UAdel, 21 October 2016.
Public Panel: 'Feeling the Past: Emotions and History', UAdel, 2 May 2016.
Conference paper: ‘Exiled Children: Care in English Convents Abroad in the Seventeenth Century’, ‘Dislocated Children: Children in/and Care’ conference, UAdel, 27 November 2015.
Roundtable discussion of pre-circulated papers: ‘Governing Bodies, Families and Society: The Rhetoric of the Passions in the Sermons of Samuel Wesley’, ‘Early Modern Literature, Sermons, and the Rhetoric of the Passions’ working day, UQ, 14 August 2015.
Conference paper: ‘The Embodiment of Exile: Relics and Suffering in Early Modern English Cloisters’, ANZAMEMS 10th Biennial International Conference, UQ, 14–18 July 2015.
Seminar Presentation: ‘Uncovering St Justin’s Relics: Religious Ritual and Political Identity in the English Augustinian Convent in Paris, 1688–1720’, at the Cambridge Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, UK, 12 November 2014.
Invited Conference Presentation: '”Engag[ing] our hearts & sincere affections in the most Strict peculiar manner”: Exiled Cloisters as Places of English Religious and Political Devotion, 1688–1745’, CHE Sacred Places, Pilgrimages and Emotions Collaboratory, The University of Melbourne, 25 May 2013.
Conference Presentation: ‘Craving appetites, impetuous lusts and headstrong passions’: Emotion and Justice in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Assize Sermons’ (in a CHE panel with Philippa Madden and Merridee Bailey), ANZAMEMS Inc. 9th Biennial Conference ‘Cultures in Translation’, Monash University, Melbourne, 14 February 2013.