Chelsea Phillips

1.     How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I started out as a performer, mostly in Shakespeare. I went to an all-women's college (Bryn Mawr), and then helped to found an all-female theatre group (Uncut Pages...get it?), so I spent a lot of time thinking about (and experiencing) the ways that bodies, gender, and texts work together to create meaning. While I took an eighteenth-century satire class with the lovely Peter Briggs, I didn't really encounter eighteenth-century theatre until much later.
 During the early days of my PhD work in Theatre, I read an article by Ellen Donkin about Sarah Siddons in which she mentioned that Siddons was pregnant during a performance, and it opened up a whole new aspect of this initial area of interest for me. So I found the eighteenth century through that--through this moment in time where women's reproductive bodies were (even if not universally and not without difficulty) accepted in the context of their professional careers in ways that often seem, sadly, remarkable to us today.
2.     What are you working on right now?
A book manuscript about celebrity pregnancy on the eighteenth-century London stage. I consider how the bodies were accommodated within a repertory company from a managerial perspective, how pregnancy intersected with a woman's established celebrity persona and the fictional characters she performed, and how these publicly pregnant bodies may offer us a new ways of thinking about some of the larger cultural movements and ideas we ascribe to the eighteenth century, such as sensibility, the rise of obstetrics as a distinct medical practice, ideas of nature and natural motherhood, etc.
3.     How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work? 
It's probably pretty self-evident from the answer above---it's everything I do! I'm fortunate in my work to be able to build on the incredible foundations that other scholars have laid in the area of women's studies, in the eighteenth century and beyond--I'm going to resist the urge to start listing people as it would take up the remaining space in this posting. 
4.     What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
 I  have to give a shout-out to Anne Helen Petersen's recent article for Buzzfeed about Kim Kardashian's first pregnancy--it hits on a lot of the questions and concerns I look at in a historical context, and spurs me on to deeper considerations of the ways celebrity bodies might have mattered to audiences then.  
I'm also returning to my Shakespeare roots this semester to teach a graduate performance class, so I've been reading Giles Block's Speaking the Speech. I love how invested he is in the smallest details of the way Shakespeare's text communicates with a performer, and how the performer then brings it to life. Beyond being a good book about Shakespeare, there's something deeply poignant right now about thinking through how and why the way we communicate matters so deeply. 
5.     What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Encourage conversation and transparency around the issues we all struggle with, and make sure those conversations intersectional. Discrimination, equitable hiring practices, pay gaps, reproductive health, emotional labor--the only way these systemic problems get any better is if we talk about them, compare experiences, compare solutions, and commit to doing a better job in the future. I also think we've got to be able to have them in person and not just over social media. 
I love what a supportive community ASECS is, particularly the Women's Caucus. Continuing and furthering our commitment to accessibility for students, adjuncts, and other non-tenured and non-tenure-track members is the kind of work that benefits us all by enriching our community.  ​

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