DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

A medievalist with Early Modern leanings, Susie Phillips (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern literature and culture, drama, poetry, Shakespeare and Chaucer. In her scholarship as well as her teaching, she is interested in the materiality of the book—how texts were produced, published, circulated, and read. Her first book, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (Penn State 2007) 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. She has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy.

Her new book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (UPenn 2025), explores the phrasebooks, and guides to conversations that flooded the marketplace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making a virtual classroom available to an audience who could not afford or did not have access to formal education. Privileging market share and mercantile savvy over moral instruction and linguistic mastery, these mischievous little books offered readers lessons in the pragmatic, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace, teaching them bargaining tactics, insults, pick up lines, and strategies for welching on debts. Revealing what happens when language learning itself undergoes a translation out of the classroom, into the marketplace and further down the social ladder, Learning to Talk Shop offers a new account of premodern education, not through erudite tomes and schoolmaster sovereigns, but through these practical books, asking what we learn and whom we can see when we look at premodern education from this humbler, more mischievous perspective.

Professor Phillips has been awarded two Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowships (2009-10, 2017-18), the Weinberg College of Arts and Science Award for Distinguished Teaching (2008), and has been named to the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll four times. In 2014, she was the recipient of an Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professorship, the University’s highest award for distinguished teaching.

Specializations

Drama & Performance, Medieval Literature, History of the Book/Material Texts, Multilingual & Comparative Literatures, Early Modern Literature

Books

Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2007)