Leila (lee-EYE-la) Walker is a PhD candidate working on her dissertation, “Touching Time: Forms of Romantic Temporality,” which argues that during the British Romantic period, a distinct “temporal aesthetic” that presented time as embodied in material objects and human bodies developed in response to scientific and philosophical advances. Like the palimpsest, these objects function less as metaphors than as tools used to define the present moment even as they disrupt it. As characters interact with these literary objects, narrative time warps, dilates, contracts, and becomes selectively legible, forcing readers to question their own historical positioning, as well as the possibility of sympathy between subjects as they change over time. Leila’s publications include “Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Ekphrasis of Hair” (European Romantic Review, forthcoming April 2013), “The Child of the City and the ‘Palimpsest’ at Sea: De Quincey’s Chronological Constraints” (Literature Compass, October 2012), and “Ghosts in the House: Margaret Oliphant’s Uncanny Response to Feminist Success” (in Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, ed. Tamara Wagner, Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009). She has presented on Shelley at ICR (2011) and Romanticism@Western (2009), Coleridge at MLA (2011) and NASSR (2010), De Quincey at ICR (2009), and utopianism at the Society for Utopian Studies annual conference (2008 and 2011). When she is not obsessing about Romantic temporality (and sometimes even when she is), Leila enjoys experimenting with digital pedagogy, cooking vegan food, and climbing rocks.
