Susan Phillips

Associate Professor of English, Associate Chair

University Hall Room 315
Telephone: (847) 491-3368
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: susie-phillips@northwestern.edu

A medievalist with Early Modern leanings, Susie Phillips (Ph.D. Harvard University) teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern book culture, medieval literature and culture (sin and confession, heresy, rebellion, courtly love), Shakespeare, and Chaucer. In her scholarship as well as her teaching, she is interested in the materiality of the book, that is, in exploring how texts were produced, published, circulated, and read. She is currently working on a book that explores the religious, cultural, and literary work of "idle talk" in late medieval England. Gossip's supposedly idle words, she argues, are transformative. They blur the boundaries between people, discourses, genres, practices, and words. Gossip has the power to alter discourses--changing idle talk into confession and confession into idle talk. It can alter genre--making fabliaux read like exempla in Chaucer's poems, or turning sermon exempla into news in sermon collections and penitential manuals. And most striking of all, it can change social relationships in fundamental ways--turning neighbors into sisters and confessors into lovers.

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