Kathryn Walls

Kathryn Margaret Walls is a New Zealand scholar of English literature, and is an emeritus professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in English literature from the Middle Ages to present day.

Academic career

Walls completed a Bachelor and a Master's degree at the University of Victoria Wellington, and was appointed as a lecturer at the university. She was awarded a Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake a PhD at the University of Toronto. Her thesis on Guillaume de Deguileville's work was titled "The pilgrimage of the lyf of the manhode": The prose translation from Guillaume de Deguileville in its English context.

Walls has published an edition of William Baspoole's The Pilgrime, and wrote God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church, published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. She taught on English literature from Chaucer to Alexander Pope, and children's literature, especially Margaret Mahy. Walls was appointed emeritus professor at Victoria in 2020. In her retirement, she planned to work on the influence of the scientific revolution on the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Selected works