ABOUT ME
DR. CHELSEA PHILLIPS is an award-winning theatre historian, dramaturg, and Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. Her research interests include early modern and eighteenth-century theatre, and social and medical history.
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She is the author of Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800 (University of Delaware Press, 2022), which received an honorable mention for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's First Book Prize.
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Her work has also appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Women's History, Shakespeare, and a variety of edited collections.
She is the winner of the 2020 Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for her 2019 Theatre Survey article, and the 2025 Annibel Jenkins Prize from the Southeast American Society for Eighteenth Century for her 2023 ECS article.
As a dramaturg, she has worked with Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson, New Dramatist resident writer C. Julian Jimenez, Manhattan Shakespeare Project, the for/word company, Uncut Pages Theatre, and artists from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Folger Shakespeare Theatre, and the American Shakespeare Center, among others.
At Villanova, she has helped develop and produce new works by Owen McCafferty, Douglas Carter Beane, Kathryn Petersen, Julia Izumi, Michael Hollinger, and Pulitzer Prize winner James Ijames.
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Chelsea received her MFA in Dramaturgy from Mary Baldwin University/The American Shakespeare Center, and her doctorate from The Ohio State University.
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