PhD Candidate, Harvard University

I am currently a Mellon Fellow at the Council for European Studies at Columbia University and a PhD Candidate in the English Department at Harvard University. I specialize in modern drama and European and Anglophone literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My additional research interests include affect theory, phenomenology, and the history of psychology. My dissertation, Bored to Life: Affect, Audience, and the Modern Stage,  examines the symbiotic histories of theatrical innovation and boring aesthetics from Existentialist philosophy of the nineteenth century to the present moment, with key studies on Maeterlinck, Chekhov, and Beckett. 
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At Harvard, I am the Executive Director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research. I also coordinated the Theater and Performance Colloquium from 2014-2017. 

​I received my BA in English and Dramatic Art from the University of North Carolina in 2010 and my AM from Harvard in 2014.

Outside of the academy, I make theater with the New York-based Cacolet Collective and the Durham, NC-based Delta Boys.

My CV can be found here: phillips_cv.pdf (updated October 2018).