Holy Cross Welcomes Blake Scholar, Michael Phillips

WORCESTER, Mass. – Author and Blake Scholar Michael Phillips will present a lecture titled, “The Creation of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience” on Monday, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. He will also present “Catherine Blake and her Household” on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 4:30 p.m. Both events, which are free and open to the public, will take place in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross.

Phillips taught at Oxford, University College London, and Edinburgh University before joining the staff of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.  At York, Phillips teaches a post-graduate class in English and the history of art titled William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Currently he is writing a biography of Blake in Lambeth during the anti-Jacobin Terror in Britain, titled Blake and the Terror.  In the spring of 2010 Phillip’s edition of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell will be published by the Bodleian Library and the University of Chicago Press.  This past summer, he was a guest curator of the first major Blake exhibition in Paris, France and editor of the catalogue, William Blake (1757-1827) Le Génie Visionnaire de Romantisme Anglais.  From 2000-01 he served as guest curator of the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Phillips’ training as a printmaker allows him to explore and replicate Blake's graphic techniques that were used to produce Blake’s illuminated books and separate prints.  Phillips’ study of the printing techniques and his research in Blake’s manuscripts is seen in his William Blake The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (British Library and Princeton University Press, 2000).  Phillips has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Yale Centre for British Art, the British Library Centre for the Book, a British Academy Research Readership in the Humanities, Waynflete Lectureship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Medal of the College de France for his research on Blake.

Most recently, Phillips has been a visiting scholar at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. There he produced a limited facsimile edition of a selection of plates from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Flying Horse Editions, 2009). An exhibition of Phillip’s facsimile copper plates and impressions opened at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Sept. and will run through Dec.