Professor Emeritus of French
Philip D. Walker (1924–2009) was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1945. During World War II, he entered the military, studying intensive Japanese at a Navy school of oriental languages in Boulder, Colorado. Following his Navy discharge, he returned to his study of Romance languages, completing his M.A. (1951) and Ph.D. (1956) degrees at Yale. Philip began his teaching career in 1957 at UCSB, where he taught 19th-century French literature until his retirement in 1990. He was involved with the early planning of the first University of California Education Abroad Program (UCEAP) and served as the first resident director of the first EAP center in Bordeaux, France, starting around its inception in 1962. His wife of five years at the time, Corlette (Cory) (1924–2017), came with Philip to UCSB, where she had a distinguished career in Art History.
Philip was an internationally recognized authority on the French naturalist writer Émile Zola. In 1967 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for related research. After publishing the biography Zola (1985) and Émile Zola: Profiles in Literature (1969), Philip became known for his original understanding of Zola’s religious thought, demonstrating, notably in his Germinal and Zola’s Religious and Philosophical Thought (1983), that the author’s “scientific determinism” and “cosmic pantheism” comprised two coexisting, rather than contradictory, dimensions of his secular theology.
Following his retirement, Philip returned to UCSB to begin a new career in music as a composer, earning his second BA from the College of Creative Studies in 1995. His trio for violin, cello, and piano paying homage to Bartók was awarded the 1994 Anne and Gordon Getty Award. "A May Music Walk," a score for a choreographic film shown at the 1997 Palm Springs Film Festival, a centennial Mass performed at All Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, Montecito, California (2000), and an orchestral piece, "Land that I Love, O Land of the Free," played by the Santa Barbara Symphony, under the direction of Gisèle Ben-Dor, on July 4, 2002, figure among his other compositions.