Dr. Kathryn Walton
PhD. English, York University
MA. English, York University
BAH. Queen's University
I have a wide variety of teaching interests ranging from medieval literature to children’s literature to popular culture. I have taught courses in Children’s Literature, Young Adult Literature, Popular Culture, Film, Sixteenth Century Literature, and Medieval Literature. I regularly teach core English courses in Orillia, including The History of English Literature II and Foundations of Literary Studies. I have developed numerous special courses on areas related to my research interests including Fantasy Literature, Fairy Tales, Utopian and Dystopian Literature, Femininity and Power, Legends of King Arthur, Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, and The First Golden Age of Children’s Literature.
My research focuses on medieval literature, children’s literature, and the development of popular genre and literary forms. My first book, Literary Magic in Medieval England, published by Boydell and Brewer, explores the creation of magic as a literary form in the Middle English period (c. 1330-1450). In this book, I rethink the traditional scholarly tendency to see magic as a vestige of a pagan past or as a residue of a cultural practice and instead examine its use and creation as a literary form.
My current research project seeks to uncover and study examples of children’s literature from the Middle Ages. It refutes the longstanding misconception that ideas of childhood and children’s literature did not exist in the Middle Ages and establishes a body of evidence to better examine the literary lives of medieval children.
Select Publications:
Literary Magic in Medieval England (Boydell and Brewer, 2027)
Everything Should be Okay: Lakehead University Students Respond to Covid-19. Ed. Kathryn Walton (Lakehead University, 2021).
“A Kaleidoscope of Power: Supernatural Women in the Auchinleck Manuscript” Parergon 42.1 (2025). 5-28.
“Rewriting a Demon: Merlin’s Characterization in Three Versions of Of Arthour and of Merlin” Arthuriana 32.1 (2022): 55-81. {Awarded the 2023 Leader Essay Prize for best essay published in the field of Arthurian Studies in the year.}
“Merlin’s Triumphant End in the Middle English Romance ‘Of Arthour and of Merlin’” L’Esplumeoir 16 (2017).
“Of Love, Magic, and Chivalry: The Romances of Courtly Life” Medieval World: Culture and Conflict 20 (November 2025): 42-46.
“Sir Gowther: The Demon Knight” Medievalists.net (July 2025)
“Children’s Literature in the Middle Ages: What did medieval children read?” Medievalists.net (June 2021)