Dr Victoria Phillips

Dr. Victoria Phillips is a writer, historian, teacher, and incoming DPhil candidate in Theology and Religion at Wolfson College, Oxford. 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 foundations of U.S. modern dance between World War I and WWII. 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 president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush. Phillips is under contract to write The Forgotten ‘Mother of Berlin’: Eleanor Lansing Dulles and her Cold Wars, 1945-1968 with Rowman&Littlefield. She has lectured internationally at universities, colleges, institutes, and high schools, and appeared on television, radio, and in podcasts. She has taught courses on cultural diplomacy, women and the conservative tradition, and dance history at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the London School of Economics, where she won the 2021 award for Innovation in Teaching. She co-directs the Cold War Archival Institute 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. At Oxford she is studying missionary memoirs by women with the tentative title, ‘”Preaching at Our Stations”: Agency and Empire in American Female Missionary Memoirs, 1810-1917.”