Chris Phillips

Teaching interests: American and transatlantic literatures of the 18th and 19th centuries; literary history; history of the book and of reading; religion and literature; literary history; literature of the sea

Research interests: American and transatlantic literatures of the 18th and 19th centuries; literary history; history of the book and of reading; religion and literature; literary history; literature of the sea; the uses of epic in American literature and culture from colonial times to the Reconstruction; readers’ interactions with hymns; the study of US presidents as authors; the history of reading communities in the Easton Library Company in the early 19th century; cartography and literature; teaching of literature using digital audio assignments

Selected publications:
The Course of Epic in American Culture, Settlement to Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.

“Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts’s Hymns to America; or, How to Perform a Hymn without Singing It,” New England Quarterly 85 (June 2012) 203-21.

“Fragmenting the Bard: Sarah Wentworth Morton’s Intertextual Epic” Literature in the Early American Republic 4 (2012): 41-65.

“Epic, Anti-Eloquence, and Abolitionism: Thomas Branagan’s Avenia and The Penitential Tyrant.” Early American Literature 44.3 (2009): 605-37.

“Lighting Out for the Rough Ground: America’s Epic Origins and the Richness of World Literature.” PMLA 122.5 (Oct. 2007): 1499-1515.