Baruch Professor Rafael Walker Wins Major CUNY Award

Baruch Professor Rafael Walker Wins Major CUNY Award

October 1, 2025

Rafael Walker, PhD, assistant professor in Baruch College's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, received the 2025 Feliks Gross Award for Outstanding Research, presented by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. The award celebrates exceptional scholarship among junior faculty across CUNY.

A Wide-ranging Scholar

Professor Walker has earned national recognition for his scholarship, including the 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in LGBTQ studies. Featured on major podcasts and media interviews, he has written and recorded a lecture series on James Baldwin.

To learn more, we asked Professor Walker five questions.

What is your research?

I work very broadly in the field of American literature and have written on fiction and poetry spanning many generations, from the pre-Civil War period to the present. My first book, Realism after Individualism: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is due out this fall with the University of Chicago Press focusing on what I designate the "second-generation of American realists," a cohort of American novelists just following such writers as Henry James and William Dean Howells. Many of the writers in this generation will be familiar to readers-Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, for example-but several others have been lost to history, most of their novels no longer in print, no matter that they were bestsellers and well-respected in their day.

My project makes the case for this group as constituting a coherent literary movement through its focus on the way that they got past older ideas about what selfhood looks like. Unlike their predecessors in the nineteenth century, who by and large, offered views of the self-compatible with liberal individualism-self-enclosed, autonomous entities-these later writers conceived of the self as utterly permeable, correcting the idea that humans were self-possessed, had control over their thoughts, feelings, and desires. In this, they joined their contemporaries in philosophy, the pragmatists, who, in the altered world brought on in the U.S. by consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century, were compelled to think of selves otherwise than their forebears.

Where did your passion in this field begin?

I've long been interested in American literature and culture, aware of the fascinating (and often frustrating) contradictions that make up our odd little society. When, late in my undergraduate career, after having studied the British novel extensively, I came across late-nineteenth-century American novels, I knew something was weird. It was clear to me that these novels behaved very differently from their British predecessors, largely in their treatment of women and desire.

In the classical nineteenth-century novel, characters usually get punished for not wanting what they should want or for not wanting how they should. The situation was almost perfectly reversed in the American novels I was reading: people, most notably women, were rewarded for excessive desire and punished for wanting too little-just what consumer culture asked for!

But, as I kept looking into the matter, I learned that this reconfiguration of desire had implications for how people understood the self, and the implications weren't all bad. Most importantly, thinking about these novels provided me a laboratory for thinking through my doubts about the stories I and most other Americans had been told about selfhood.

What has this research taught you?

Quite a lot. In addition to what I mention above, I've learned the importance of treating all premises, no matter how entrenched, skeptically. The alternative history that I write about the American novel would not have been possible if I hadn't been willing to question scholarly premises that have been place for almost a century. (Indeed, one of the surprising and perhaps eccentric aspects of my book is that I am deeply in dialogue from scholars from the 1940s and 50s!)

How do you bring your research into the classroom?

I bring much of my findings to my classroom discussions, but probably the clearest way in which my research has appeared in the classroom is through a course I put on the books during my first couple of years at Baruch.

Based on my second book project, ENG 4560: Mixed-Race Literature, provides students the opportunity to think about the specificity of mixed-race literature (especially black-white) as distinct from the canons into which it's customarily associated. By extension, it provides them the opportunity to think about mixed-race people apart from the binary racial categorizations we have inherited from Jim Crow.

What's next?

While writing that first book (discussed above), I began a second on mixed-race literature, a swath of literature that often gets swept up in African American literature. Several essays have sprung from this work-not just academic ones but a more broadly aimed essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education explaining President Trump's attempt at impugning Vice President Harris's racial identification.

I've also published a critical edition with Broadview Press of Passing, by the mixed-race writer Nella Larsen; the edition makes the concerns with mixed-race identity that so preoccupied Larsen accessible to seasoned scholars and students alike.

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