About
Chris Phillips is Professor of English at Lafayette College, specializing in American and transatlantic literatures of the 18th and 19th centuries, history of the book, religion and literature, historical poetics, and the digital humanities. He is the author of numerous articles on the above subjects, as well as the books Epic in American Culture, Settlement to Reconstruction, (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and The Hymnal: A Reading History (Johns Hopkins, 2018), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance (2018).
He is writing a followup to Hymnal, which develops a theory of the hymn as a poetic genre. In addition, since 2010 he is the principal investigator for the Easton Library Company Database Project, a digital project at Lafayette College in partnership with the Easton Area Public Library; this project is focused on digitizing and transcribing the loan records and related materials from the Easton Library Company (1811-1862), the Lehigh Valley’s first public library.