Obituary

Obituary Kim Walker K i m Walker was b o m in England and travelled to N e w Zealand by ship at the age of 11, entranced at seeing whales on the way. Never really an Anglophile, she stayed, going to school in Northland and Whangarei, and then to Auckland University where she studied English literature, then travelling to Hawaii, and finally for graduate study to the University of Edinburgh, where she gained her PhD. For several years she taught in the English Departments at Trinity and University Colleges, Dublin, before being appointed to a lectureship in English at Victoria University of Wellington in 1988, with academic specialties in Renaissance studies and Shakespeare. 2 Obituary Kim Walker died with tragic suddenness in July 2002, aged only 46, while snorkeling on a brief midwinter holiday in Vanuatu. She had just completed examining a large Shakespeare undergraduate class and afirst-yearcourse on Literature and Cultural Politics, in which she offered a case study on romantic and post-colonial readings of The Tempest. She had been diagnosed as suffenng from Parkinson's Disease five years earlier, was determined to keep on with work she enjoyed, and was about to go on research leave to Edinburgh. Kim will be remembered by readers of Parergon as a colleague, for her papers at various A N Z A M E M S and A U L L A conferences, as a reviewer for Parergon, Australasian Drama Studies, Illusions and. elsewhere, and in particula as the convenor of the Wellington A N Z A M E M S conference in 1998. As a member of the university community Kim was enthusiastic, meticulous, and immensely hard-working. Her commitment to the day-to-day academic work, people and values of the School of English, Film and Theatre - as well as a great deal of university committee work - was legendary. She was unerringly professional and instinctively collegial, exercising creativity and an easy manner yet all the while maintaining tirelessly high standards for herself. Kim was innovative as a teacher, reformulating the Shakespeare course as genre study and being thefirstto make use of a new on-line facility, Blackboard. Her lectures were adorned by annual productions with young professional directors, for example in support of different readings of a scene from 3 Henry VI, or the famous end-of-term performance of Act V ofA Midsummer Nights Dream. She taught honours papers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Women Writers, and was formative in establishing a new course in Reading Women Writers at undergraduate level, where she ventured into psychoanalytic literary theory and introduced students to Angela Carter - on one memorable occasion, in person. She was a regular guest lecturer on Shakespeare and the Renaissance stage for Toi Whakaari, the N e w Zealand Drama School. She loved the theatre and dressing up, and on occasions would appear at lectures garbed for the part. Recently Kim (alone from this School) contributed to a new faculty course on Sexuality and wrote three custom-built lectures for it, re-reading Clarissa and Lady Chatterley's Lover for the purpose - with a clip ofAuden's poem in Three Weddings and a Funeral thrown in. Kim Walker had already produced four significant scholarly books when she died: an old spelling edition of James Shirley's The Dukes Mistris (1988)' a co-edited publication of Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee with introduction and notes (with H. J. McCormack, 1988); the edition of Volume V of The N I Obituary 3 and Selected Works ofMaria Edgeworth (Pickering and Chatto, 1999) with Heidi Thomson and Marilyn Butler; and, most importantly, her acclaimed Women Writers of the English Renaissance which appeared in the Twayne's English Authors series in 1996. The Parergon reviewer describes this as 'a model of its kind - suggestive and informative, lucid and scholarly...[and] notable for its acuity and incisiveness'. As well as chapters on Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth, there are wider discussions on issues of translation, piety, and the 'strategies of intellectualfiliationand affective investment, as well as the overdetermining effects of patronage and familial networks' (Kate Lilley, Parergon Vol. 16, No. 1). For many years K i m prepared the English...