Graduate Student Directory

Research Interests

Philip's dissertation is an extended case study of the Cofradía de San José, a pious association of lay Catholics in the colonial Philippines that clashed with the Spanish state in the 1840s. Construed by the secular authorities as an independence movement, and denounced by the ecclesiastical authorities as heretical, the group was violently crushed, with hundreds of its members killed in battle. Afterwards, surviving members were questioned as to their movement's purpose. They answered, "To pray." The dissertation is dedicated to understanding this statement. What was the necessesity of prayer for these people in this specific moment of history, to which they were devoted to the point of giving their lives? What are the specific contours of prayer as a physical, spiritual, and social practice, what needs did it address, and how did it constitute a form of effective action in their world? How was the Cofradía's practice of prayer continuous with Catholic tradition, and how was it adapted to local conditions? What kinds of relationships did prayer foster, both with human and extra-human or divine agents? In what conditions does prayer become dangerous to political and religious authorities? At the heart of these questions is a conviction that in order to understand the actions of the Cofradía, and similar popular religious movements in history, we must take their religious content seriously. As such my research is also a theoretical intervention which argues that groups like the Cofradía expose the limits of secular scholarship, highligting the fact that the intellectual traditions of modernity are contiguous with the political forces that have tended to suppress popular religious movements in modernity. 

Biography, Education and Training

Phil grew up in Boyne City, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied jazz trombone with Dennis Wilson and graduated with a degree in English and Music in 2012. In 2014 he co-founded a literary and political magazine based in Detroit called The Periphery, for which he wrote essays on movies and moviegoing. In 2020 he published A People's History of Detroit (Duke University Press), co-written with Mark Jay. 

Honors, Awards and Grants

2022-Teaching Fellowship, History of Consciousness Department

2022-Gary Lease Fellowship, UCSC Humanities Division

2021-SEACoast Junior Scholars Research Fund

2021-Outstanding Teaching Assistant, History of Consciousness Department

2021-Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship (Filipino), U.S. Department of Education

2021-Dissertation Proposal Development Program, Social Science Research Council

2019/20-Regents Fellowship, UCSC

2019-Humanities Fellowship, UCSC

Selected Publications

A People's History of Detroit. With Mark Jay. Duke University Press, 2020.

"Opportunity Detroit." With Mark Jay. Jacobin, 2018.

"Detroit and the political origins of 'broken windows' policing." With Mark Jay. Race and Class, 2017.

Selected Presentations

2024 - "Philippine 'Folk' and the Christian Mystical Tradition." Fourteenth International Conference on Religion and Spirituality in Society.

Teaching Interests

HISC 123 - What Is Belief? Mystics, Heretics, and Aliens