Faculty Profile

Siobhan Phillips

(she/her/hers)Professor of English (2011)

Contact Information

phillisi@dickinson.edu

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.