Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s teaching and research areas include twentieth- and twenty-first-century British, Irish, and Anglophone literatures, the history and theory of the novel, comparative modernisms, world literature, translation studies, and the history of the book. In addition, she is interested in issues of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial theory, and critical theory.

She is currently at work on a book entitled "After the National Paradigm: Translation, Comparison, and the New World Literature," which considers the effects of globalization on national paradigms of literary culture and argues for the emergence of new forms of “comparative writing” in contemporary transnational literature. Chapters will include studies of novelists, translators, and anthologists such as Jamaica Kincaid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, and J. M. Coetzee. An article from the project has recently appreared in NOVEL, and another is forthcoming from New Literary History . Other current work includes an essay for PMLA, authored with Douglas Mao, on "the new modernist studies" and a book chapter on the post-consensus English novel and globalization for The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel.