Chris Phillips is associate professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the author of Epic in American Culture, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012. Chris has been a Lapides Fellow at AAS and is presently an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow spending time at AAS researching his new book on reading hymns.
In this interview Chris discusses his own epic adventures searching in libraries and archives for material that formed the foundation of his newest book, The Hymnal Before the Notes: A History of Reading and Practice, which Chris began working on at AAS several years ago. He also talks about his early years as a graduate student working with Jay Fliegelman, the nature of epic in America, libraries and reading, and even reads a little Milton poetry for us.
Chris Phillips is such an interesting and engaging scholar that every time I hear him talk about his work it makes me wonder whether I made a mistake by going into engineering and should have been a literary historian!! Great interview, thanks for posting.