Katherine Walden

Katherine Walden is an Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies and faculty director for the Minor in Sport, Media & Culture (SMAC) at the University of Notre Dame. She is a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program and Department of Computer Science & Engineering (College of Engineering). She is affiliated with the Initiative on Race & Resilience; Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society; Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship; and Institute for Social Concerns.

Her work looks at baseball, labor, and globalization, using 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 actively involved in the Foundry Field Project, a local public history, community-engagement initiative that spans a physical baseball field project, mural wall, educational programming, and other forms of storytelling around baseball, race, and representation.

Walden teaches courses on critical approaches to sport, data, and computing (in a variety of combinations). 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. Her institutional capacity-building and faculty-development work in this space has been supported by the National Science Foundation and Mozilla Foundation

Walden received a Ph.D. in American Studies with a Sport Studies emphasis at the University of Iowa, where she also earned M.A. in Library & 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 & Museum, and Grinnell College (Iowa). She has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Association for Computers & the Humanities, American Studies Association, Urban Humanities Network, and North American Society for Sport History.