The Life of a Historian…and Writer and Teacher and Nonprofit Director

Dr. Tamara Walker ’96 credits almost all of her achievements, which are many, to Colorado Academy. “I mean this honestly,” says the native of Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, who attended CA from Tenth to Twelfth Grade. “I would not be an historian of Latin America and a nonprofit founder were it not for Ms. [Peggy] Salisbury’s Spanish classes and the Interim trip to Mexico. The CA Interim program changed the entire course of my life and is the reason behind everything I have pursued since then.” An Ivy League graduate, Fulbright Scholar, and award-winning author, Walker is a history professor at the University of Toronto and leads a nonprofit organization that gives low-income students travel opportunities. When work doesn’t feel like work

Walker’s scholarly research focuses on slavery, race, and gender in Latin America. For her 2017 book Exquisite Slaves, she logged hours and hours in the archives. She pored over historical documents, searching for the words and voices of enslaved men and women who could not tell their stories in ways more literate people could. For instance, the criminal trial testimony for a case of stolen clothing revealed the common perception of the time that enslaved people could only ever obtain nice clothing through theft. Walker shares these discoveries not only in academic writing, but with the college students in her classroom. As her research gives access to previously unheard voices, her teaching helps her students connect to the lived experiences of people of the past. “It doesn’t feel like work in a lot of ways,” she says. “It feels really meaningful to me, and I get to talk about things that really interest me, with interesting students from all over the world. We learn about the past, and we think about the present.” Currently, she’s writing a book about the experience of traveling and living abroad as an African American.

Paying forward a lifechanging experience

Walker says her work combines many of the joyful aspects of her CA experience: culture, travel, research. “My early exposure to international travel came while I was a scholarship student at CA,” she says. “I participated in immersive programs in Mexico and France, and those experiences nurtured within me an abiding interest in foreign languages and cultures.” Walker knows that many people from the historically low-income neighborhood where she grew up don’t get these opportunities—or the chance to forge a career from them. So, she’s determined to make the most of them and to bring the same opportunities to other students. That’s why she co-founded The Wandering Scholar, which provides scholarships and programming to make international travel and learning opportunities accessible to exceptional high schoolers from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds. “I want to make opportunities like I had accessible to students who can’t afford, or maybe even conceive of, those opportunities,” she says. Bolstered by full scholarship funding, students in The Wandering Scholar programs are doing incredible things, she says. They’ve produced educational videos and documentaries, as well as creative projects like art, poetry, and cookbooks. Their international experiences have spurred them to plan to go to college and to think what to study there. Some of them have gone on to pursue graduate study, just like Walker.

“The CA Interim program changed the entire course of my life and is the reason behind everything I have pursued since then.”

Dr. Tamara Walker ’96

A place where possibilities become reality

In addition to the Interim program and Ms. Salisbury’s Spanish class, Walker has gratitude for the support and warmth she experienced at CA. “It is such a welcoming, warm place,” she says. “The teachers treated us all the same, no favorites. They took us seriously as people and thinkers, capable of grasping complicated topics and talking about them in meaningful ways.” And they helped prepare Walker to become the first person in her family to go to college. “I didn’t have a sense of what I wanted to do as an adult,” she says. “Through CA, I realized the possibilities that existed, that I had the abilities to make those possibilities a reality, and that there were no limits to what I could do.” n