In 2015, Walker partnered with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum to direct Project Continua, a website devoted to female biographies.
[1][2] Her latest work in regaining women displaced from the historical record is The New Historia, a project that is an encyclopedia of female networks and intellectual contributions.
These included her discovery of primary documents by and about Mary Hays (1759-1843) in private hands, now part of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library.
Walker ultimately wrote her thesis on the personal writings of James Boswell––using his recently discovered journals as source material––as viewed through the prism of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).
Her advisor praised her thesis but told her she was “too pretty to bother with a Ph.D.” and that she should “go home and get married.”[7] Greatly discouraged, she applied to New York University to pursue doctoral research.
[9] It was Cameron who first encouraged her to visit the New York Public Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, of which he was the founding Director, to see what information was available about Mary Hays.
Her writing was criticized for questioning the inequality of the sexes, and she was personally attacked for pursuing knowledge (historically a male occupation) and being homely.
Scholars realized they had surpassed Mary Hays's source material yet continued to uncover female philosophers and intellectuals who had been lost to history.
The goal was to create a public, multimedia resource dedicated to the preservation of women's intellectual history from the earliest surviving evidence into the 21st century.
"There have always been women producing knowledge and contributing to human understanding and participating in the great events and new ideas of their time," said Walker in an interview.
[15] Walker and the scholars initially believed they were supplementing the traditional historical canon with new information––hence the name Project Continua––but as the scope of previously unknown and suppressed material came to light, they renamed their effort The New Historia.
[18] “Historically, Wikipedia may not be that different from the very first encyclopedias, which developed as a way for educated men to communicate with each other and create foundational knowledge” said Gina Luria Walker during an interview with The Atlantic.
The very first version of Encyclopædia Britannica, written between 1768 and 1771, featured 39 pages on curing disease in horses, and three words on woman: 'female of man'.
Walker, having exhumed biographical information about and philosophical writing by thousands of previously lost historical women and motivated by her Wikipedia project, wanted to publish her findings without bias and make them accessible to all.
Walker states her motivation behind the project: “More women wrote texts and contributed to society in the past than we can possibly believe.
New translations of Bronze Age texts reveal women were central to global trade since antiquity––not only in manufacturing cloth but in running textile empires.