Faculty Profile
Siobhan Phillips
(she/her/hers)Professor of English (2011)
Contact Information
East College Room 407
717-245-1729
Bio
Phillips teaches American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, food studies, and creative writing. She has published a scholarly study, The Poetics of the Everyday (Columbia UP, 2010), and a novel, Benefit (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022), as well as essays, poems, and articles in various journals.
Education
- B.A., Yale University, 1999
- M.Phil., Oxford University, 2001
- M.A., University of East Anglia, 2002
- Ph.D., Yale University, 2007
2024-2025 Academic Year
Fall 2024
ENGL 101 Literature and Food
This course looks at how literary texts take on some key questions of food and culture, including the status of the body, the preservation and evolution of tradition, the effects and redress of hunger, the morality of pleasure, and the relationship of humans to the non-human world. We will consider a range of genres-fiction, poetry, memoir, essay, reportage-to understand how elements of artistic form alter potential answers to the questions that food presents.
WGSS 301 Family & US Fiction Since1945
Cross-listed with ENGL 341-01. This course looks at fiction from the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries next to contemporaneous and otherwise relevant ideas about the family from legal, political, psychological, and social thought. Focusing on the tension between individuality and belonging, we will consider how fiction reflects and complicates different models for familial relationships. Authors studied may include James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, and Justin Torres.
ENGL 341 Family & US Fiction Since1945
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-03. This course looks at fiction from the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries next to contemporaneous and otherwise relevant ideas about the family from legal, political, psychological, and social thought. Focusing on the tension between individuality and belonging, we will consider how fiction reflects and complicates different models for familial relationships. Authors studied may include James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, and Justin Torres.
ENGL 403 Questions/Methods of Lit Schol
Permission of Instructor Required. This class will prepare students for writing a senior thesis by exploring some central questions of literary scholarship. Our class will begin with various analyses of a single novel, using this focus to exemplify possibilities in framing and investigating a scholarly question. Meanwhile, students will pursue a series of independent projects that test different parts of the research process for other primary texts of their own choosing.
Spring 2025
ENGL 220 Intro to Literary Studies
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
ENGL 404 Senior Thesis Workshop
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.