Gina M. Luria Walker is a professor of women’s studies at The New School. An intellectual historian, Walker is best known for her work on late-18th-to-early-19th century English feminist intellectual Mary Hays, whose 1803 work Female Biography inspired Walker’s academic interest in the biographies of historical women.

Born Gina Luria in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942, Luria received her B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University before receiving her Ph.D. in 18th century literature from New York University in 1972 for her dissertation on Mary Hays. In 1976, she edited the reprints of 44 volumes of selected writing by 18th-to-19th century English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and members of her circle for Garland Publishing. After teaching at Northwestern University and Rutgers University, and working as a real estate consultant, she married her second husband, Chauncey Walker, in 1989. In 1993 Walker was hired by The New School’s Adult Division, and ran the “Conversations About Women” special program, a series of panels and lectures on women’s issues, with a special focus on women’s writing and women writers, until the series’ end in 1995. By 1998 she was made chair of the social sciences department of the university's Adult Division.

In 2009, Walker created the Female Biography Project, a group of scholars attempting to investigate and revise the entries of Mary Hay’s original Female Biography. Once this updated edition was published in 2013, the Female Biography Project became Project Continua, an online archive of biographies of historical women. In 2022, this again changed its name to The New Historia.

As of 2024, Walker is a professor of women's studies in the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE), a division of The New School.

Sources:

Ellen Moors, “Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft". The New York Review of Books, February 19. 1976. Accessed July 16, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/vindicating-mary-wollstonecraft/

“Gina Luria Weds Chauncey Walker”. The New York Times, July 10, 1989. Accessed July 16, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/10/style/gina-luria-weds-chauncey-walker.html

Gina Luria Walker. “Core Convictions: Women, Epistemological Authority, and the Canon”. Lecture. Temple University, Philadelphia. March 17, 2018. Accessed July 16, 2024, https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTXim2Pk7tm9JgRAmEvwuN14z31iIZmMLB16FI6Jw78y7PmMMiKOx2K8NUMDkaZ_Oop_zIOrpuqMP3i/pub

New School Office of Communications (1994). Conversations about Women series. George Calderaro New School Office of Communications records (NS.03.01.03, Box 4, Folder 47), The New School Archives and Special Collections.

The New School (1992). New School Bulletin 1993 Spring Vol. 50 No. 4 [course catalog]. New School Course Catalog Collection. New School Archives and Special Collections. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_ns1993sp

The Women's Legacy Project was an initiative at The New School between 2017 and 2019, that began with a seminar course first offered in the spring 2017. The project was co-founded by Ellen M. Freeberg and Gina Luria Walker, and was an iteration of Luria Walker’s larger project “The New Historia” of which she is the director. The Women’s Legacy Project aimed to research and disseminate information on the biographies of notable women in the history of The New School. This includes, but is not limited to, women such as Caroline Tilden Bacon, Frieda Wunderlich, and Clara Woolie Mayer. As part of this project, students highlighted and further researched the ten women known as the “Founding Mothers” of the New School for Social Research in 1919.

The seminar course offered in spring 2017 and again in the spring 2018 semester was taught by Luria Walker and Freeberg. It was situated academically in the Humanities department of the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE) and cross-listed in the Liberal Studies department of the New School for Social Research (NSSR), both of which are divisions of the university. Enrollment was open to undergraduate and graduate level students and the course description was as follows:

Women’s Legacy at The New School: recovering professions, practitioners, and innovators extends the contemporary global project of feminist discovery and reclamation of historical women to the understudied female intellectuals, academics, performers, artists, activists, and others who contributed to the founding and evolution of the University and its programs. The emphasis will be on project-based inquiry, supervised primary research, and production of original "female biographies” that more accurately establish women’s historical legacy. In preparation for the 100th anniversary of the school’s founding in 2019 students will disseminate their new findings through print, social, and digital media, and a curated space on the New School History Website. Distinguished guest faculty from around the university will offer lectures on specific disciplines, individuals, and historical contexts. The course will culminate in a student-faculty conference.