Rate My Professor Susie Phillips

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.