Her research focuses on modernism, the contemporary novel, and transnational approaches to literary history. Walkowitz has published Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006), Bad Modernisms, edited with Douglas Mao (Duke University Press, 2006), and The Turn to Ethics, edited with Marjorie Garber and Beatrice Hanssen (Routledge, 2000).