Katherine Walden

Katherine Walden is an Assistant Teaching Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program and Department of Computer Science and Engineering (College of Engineering). She is affiliated with the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center (ND-TEC).

Her work looks at the intersection of sport and American culture, with a focus on baseball, labor, and globalization. Her research uses data analysis, visualization, and interactive digital mapping to illustrate the scale and scope of Minor League Baseball labor, as well as the historical forces and labor structures that shape Minor League players’ working conditions. She is also involved in outreach and advocacy work lobbying for improved working conditions for Minor League players.

Walden teaches courses on critical approaches to sport, data, and technology (in a variety of combinations and configurations) at Notre Dame. Regularly-taught courses include “Baseball and America,” “Football in America,” “Sport and Big Data,” “Data Feminism,” and “Race and Technologies of Surveillance.” Informed by intersectional feminism and anti-racist pedagogies, her teaching practice equips students to think critically about historical context and intersecting structures of power while also building interdisciplinary data literacy, data science, and computational thinking skills.

Walden received a Ph.D. in American Studies-Sport Studies at the University of Iowa, where she also earned M.A. in Library and Information Science, with a Certificate in Public Digital Humanities. Walden earned a B.M. in Musical Arts from Vanderbilt University. She has previously worked at the Iowa Women’s Archives, Library of Congress, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and most recently Grinnell College (Iowa). She has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, American Studies Association, and North American Society for Sport History.