Patricia Phillippy

My expertise is in early modern English literature and culture, which I approach from comparative and transdisciplinary perspectives. Situated between the archival and the artefactual, my research studies manuscript and early printed sources alongside objects, artworks and the built and natural environments of the early modern world. Thematically, I am concerned with the centrality of the arts of memory to early modern formulations of gender and identity. My most recent monograph, Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge, 2018), examines textual, visual and material forms of commemoration in the century stretching from the Elizabethan Settlement to the English Civil War. Funeral monuments were ubiquitous in post-Reformation England, whether situated in churches—where they are material emblems of the union of art, memory and community—or circulating in more flexible, mobile works, such as manuscript and printed memorials, portraits, jewellery, textiles or ‘rarities’. Removing these artefacts from parochial and antiquarian fields of enquiry, I reimagine monuments as pervasively involved with other commemorative arts, not least literary works by our most canonical writers. While consistently inflected by questions of gender and women’s authorship, my work sets these concerns in relation to canonical works and relevant aspects of political, religious, and cultural discourses of the early modern period. This principle guided my editorship of A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge, 2018), a collection of twenty-two chapters by leading international scholars in the field. 

I received my PhD from Yale University in Renaissance Studies, and taught at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas for several years before moving to the United Kingdom. I joined Coventry in 2020 as a Professor of Material and Cultural Memories and Executive Director of the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. My professional activities continue to play out on an international field. I am Senior Editor of Sixteenth Century Journal, the flagship publication of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and I serve as liaison between the Modern Language Association and the Society for the Studies of Early Modern Women and Gender. My research has been awarded funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Renaissance Society of America, among others. My academic activities span both research and practice: I hold a BA and MA from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and have taught and supervised MA dissertations and PhD theses in creative writing (poetry) throughout my career. 

My scholarly publications collectively demonstrate the value of pursuing creative, associative bonds across national and disciplinary borders and between visual, material, and literary forms. My current research exemplifies my commitment to establishing the relevance of early modern studies to twenty first century concerns. 'Women, Matter and Climate in the Early Modern World' aims to deepen our understandings of gendered authorship and of contemporary environmental theory by investigating women’s material creations—manuscripts, monuments, books and buildings—as related to climate and place. I introduce into early modern women’s studies a posthumanist critical strand that attends to the interfaces and exchanges joining bodies and the world in mutual, emergent relationships and ecologies. The recent stratigraphic relocation of the Anthropocene in the pre-industrial context of the Columbian Exchange invites a reassessment of the rich intersection of women’s creativity and climate change as a site of revisionary and resistant writing where gender is built alongside environmental change.