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
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
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.
CRWR 218 Creative Writ:Poetry & Fiction
An introductory creative writing workshop in poetry and fiction.
ENGL 331 First-Person Fiction
This course will consider the prevalence, importance, and variety of the first person in recent Anglophone fiction; through this focus, we will examine possibilities of character and narration while relating these aspects of craft to contemporary literary culture and broader historical developments. Authors may include Anna Burns, Rachel Cusk, Noor Naga, Julie Otsuka, and Joseph Earl Thomas.
CRWR 500 Independent Study
Spring 2026
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 222 Cookbooks: Craft and Culture
This course will consider the cookbook as a literary form and a cultural artifact. We will focus on US texts from the last three centuries, considering how these works inflect questions of temporality, labor, ecology, and identity, among other topics. Readings will include primary texts from Bracken, Child, Chao, Lewis, Smart-Grosvenor, and Toklas along with a range of historical and theoretical secondary texts.