Prof. Phillips Garners Fellowships for Hymnbook Research

Chris Phillips, associate professor of English, is completing a book-length study of the reading and use of hymnbooks in the English-speaking world, from the time they entered congregational use around 1700 to the introduction of music and text on the same page in the 1850s. In his forthcoming book, The Hymnal Before the Notes, Phillips finds that hymnbooks were used to assert the legitimacy of new religious communities, from African Methodism to Reform Judaism. The books also served to teach basic reading, create a culture of poetry reading among all social classes, and form social bonds through gift exchange. Phillips’s research has been supported by highly prestigious and competitive fellowships including a five-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the year-long Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Phillips will complete his research this year which he is spending at the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts. Phillips looks forward to bringing substantial new knowledge and insights into early American and British literatures back to the Lafayette classroom next fall.