Biography
Dr. Victoria Phillips is a writer, historian, teacher, and perpetual student. Her writing has appeared in such varied publications as the New York Times, Crescent Review, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, American Communist History, Ballet News, Dance Research Journal, Diplomatica, and Religions. Her first book, Dance is a Weapon (France: CND, 2008), explored the communist influence on the development of U.S. modern dance in the 1920s and 1930s. Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford, 2020), called “a cracking good read” by the Women’s History Network, chronicles modern dancer Martha Graham’s global tours for the US State Department for every presidential administration between 1955 and 1987. Phillips is under contract with Rowman & Littlefield | Lexington Books to write The Forgotten ‘Mother of Berlin’: Eleanor Lansing Dulles and her Cold Wars, 1945-1968.
As an instructor, she co-directs the Cold War Archival Institute (CWAR) at the Wilson Center in Washington DC, which offers cutting edge archival training to MA and PhD students and houses the CARE International Research Project. She has taught both Cold War and dance history at Columbia University, Barnard and Marymount Colleges, in Budapest, and at the London School of Economics, where she received the 2021 university award for Innovation in Teaching. In addition, she teaches memoir writing in the Jaffna region of Sri Lanka to young women.
She holds a PhD, MA, MBA, and BA from Columbia University, a MA and MFA from NYU, an MA in Biography and Memoir from the City of New York Graduate Center, and is on leave from St. Andrews, Scotland, pursuing an advanced degree in Divinity in order to conduct research for a work on the overlooked genre of U.S. female missionary memoirs during the period known as the ‘American Renaissance,’ between 1815 and 1860.
Research Interests
Women, Cold War Culture, Dance, History, Research