Austin Walker

Austin Walker is Associate Director of the Lumen Christi Institute and a Scholar-in-Residence. In directing LCI’s University Program, he oversees the presentation of the Church’s intellectual tradition on the University of Chicago campus. In directing its Cultural Forum, he supervises the articulation of the Church’s mind on questions of the day for a lay Catholic audience.  He also leads LCI’s Executive Great Books seminar series and serves as an instructor at the University of Chicago’s Graham School Basic Program of Liberal Education. In 2022, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought, where he wrote on John Henry Newman’s political philosophy. He holds M.A.’s from the University of Chicago and the University of Mississippi.  He received a B.A. with highest honors in Classical Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  From 2007 to 2011, he taught in the Mississippi Delta for the Mississippi Teacher Corps, where he received the Andrew P. Mullins Jr. Award in 2009. He and his wife have three young children.