Susie Phillips

Susie Phillips serves as the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor of English in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where she joined the faculty in 2003, served as associate department chair, and is a member of the graduate faculty. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University, a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. A medievalist with Early Modern leanings, Phillips teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern literature and culture, drama, poetry, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her pedagogy features innovative assignments like full-dress performances of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as final exams, visits to Deering Library Special Collections, trips to the theater for live performances, and incorporation of students' favorite poems and pop songs to explore themes of sin, confession, heresy, and rebellion.

Phillips's scholarship investigates the materiality of the book—how texts were produced, published, circulated, and read—and non-elite perspectives on pre-modern education, multilingualism, and marketplace ethics. Her first monograph, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2007), explores the religious, cultural, and literary work of "idle talk" in late medieval England, arguing that gossip blurs boundaries between people, discourses, genres, practices, and words. She has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. Her forthcoming book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), examines phrasebooks and guides to conversations from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that made a virtual classroom available to those without access to formal education. Privileging market share and mercantile savvy over moral instruction, these mischievous books offered lessons in pragmatic marketplace ethics, including bargaining tactics, insults, pick-up lines, and strategies for welching on debts. Among her honors are the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professorship (2014), the university’s highest teaching award; two Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowships (2009-10, 2017-18); the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Teaching (2008); and four Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll selections.

Professional Email: susie-phillips@northwestern.edu