Dr Dominic Walker, CRASSH
dw610@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a College Lecturer in English at Magdalene College and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at CRASSH. I have taught Practical Criticism and Critical Practice across Parts I and II of the English Tripos at Magdalene since 2021, and have supervised 40 Magdalene undergraduates over five academic years, including seven final-year dissertation supervisions and two second-year dissertation supervisions.
I completed my AHRC-funded PhD, Samuel Beckett and Economics (2017), under the supervision of Professor Peter Boxall. My thesis examined the thematisation of economics in Beckett’s work, arguing that the economic content of Beckett’s writing is more “concrete” than “metaphysical,” mimicking rather than reproducing culture’s abstraction from material life with a pantomime of lenient otherworldliness. Before that I took the “Issues in Modern Culture” English MA at UCL (Distinction) and a BA in English at Sussex (First). In 2024–25 I was the first literary scholar to hold a Visiting Scholarship at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University in the Center’s seventeen-year history.
In March 2026, Professor Sarah Dillon and I co-convened an international, interdisciplinary workshop, What is Influence? Towards a theory and practice of the study of influence at CRASSH, which brought together literary scholars, epidemiologists, theologians, central-bank communications specialists, physicians, and philosophers of science to develop new methods for the attribution and interpretation of influence.
Research Interests
My monograph proposal, Underwriting the Market: The Literary Foundations of Modern Economics, 1870–1945, is under consideration with the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press. The book reads the founding figures of modern economics — Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Lionel Robbins, Joan Robinson, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek — as economists whose thinking was formed through literary apprenticeships they later disavowed in a bid for nomothetic credibility. Drawing on archival sources at the Marshall Library, the LSE Robbins Papers, the Keynes and Robinson Papers at King’s College Cambridge, and the Hoover Institution’s Hayek Archive, the book reads Walras’s fiction, Robbins’s poetry and drama, Robinson’s criticism and satire, Keynes’s philosophy of tragedy, and Hayek’s “more or less erotic and violent” plays as literary records of beliefs and sensibilities not yet codified as economics.
Professor Dillon and I are planning an edited collection and a collaborative journal article on methodologies for the attribution and interpretation of influence across non-contiguous fields, building on the What is Influence? workshop. Now that the proposal for Underwriting the Market has been submitted to Thinking Literature, I have begun preparing my second monograph, provisionally titled Revealed Preferences: Literature, Economics, and the Problem of Influence, which will examine how leading contemporary economists understand the influence of their literary and cultural engagements on their economic ideas.
Since 2023, I have presented seventeen papers in six countries, at conferences hosted by the History of Economic Thought Society, the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, the British Society for Literature and Science, the Critical Political Economy Research Network, and the International Society for Intellectual History.
Selected Publications
Current and forthcoming articles develop this research across literary studies, intellectual history, and the history of economic thought. “Austenomics” has been accepted subject to revision by Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. “First as Tragedy? Literary Influence on Two Theorists of Economic Crisis” is under review at History of Political Economy as an invited submission. “Hating Beckett” is under peer review at American Imago. “Hayek’s Tragicomic Market Theory” is under review at Representations. “‘Beauty and the Beast’: Joan Robinson’s Literary Critique of Neoclassical Economics” is in advanced preparation for Textual Practice.
Earlier publications include essays in Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Estudios Irlandeses (2019), and the Journal of Beckett Studies (2018), alongside the doctoral thesis Samuel Beckett and Economics (Sussex, 2017) and “Bounded in a Nutshell” in Excursions Journal (2014).
