About
Dr. Timothy Walker (B.A., Hiram College, 1986; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University, 2001) is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. At UMD, he served as campus Fulbright Program Adviser (faculty and students; 2005-2022); prior posts include Director of Tagus Press and Director of the UMass in Lisbon Study Abroad Program. He is a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Portuguese Studies; an affiliated faculty member of the Center of Indian Studies and Program in Women’s Studies. Walker is also an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História d'Aquém e d'Além-Mar (CHAM); Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. From 1994 to 2003, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon. During Fall Term 2010 Walker was a visiting professor at Brown University. In September 2018 he was appointed a Guest Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Walker served on the editorial board of the journal Social History of Medicine. He is the recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship to Portugal (1996-1997), a doctoral research fellowship from the Camões Institute (Portugal; 1995-1996), and a NEH-funded American Institute for Indian Studies Professional Development Grant for post-doctoral work in India (2000-2002). Walker has been named a fellow of the Portuguese Fundação Oriente, the Luso-American Development Foundation (2003 & 2008), and has held a Travel Grant to the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College, London (Spring 2003). Walker worked as a Lisbon-based researcher (1999-2001) on the Atlantic Slave Trade Database Project (Cambridge U. Press; D. Eltis, S. Behrendt & D. Richardson) and on the Global History of Leprosy Project, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford University (2003). From 2005 to 2007 he held a U. C. Davis/Mars Research Fellowship while working on the “Colonial Chocolate Project,” coordinated through the University of California Davis Department of Nutrition. In 2007, Walker was named a senior researcher on a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the competitive sharing of contested religious sites around the globe (2007-2011). He held a Gulbenkian Foundation fellowship in Lisbon, Portugal (2010-2011) and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2012-2013). In 2018 he won (as co-PI) a U.S. National Science Foundation Geography and Spatial Sciences Program grant.
Teaching fields include Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, the Portuguese and their empire, history of medicine, maritime history, and European global colonial expansion. Current research topics include the adoption of colonial indigenous medicines by Europeans; climate data derived from colonial-era archival documentation; slave trading in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans; as well as commercial and cultural links between the Portuguese overseas colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.