Graduate Student Directory

Research Interests

In late October 1841 some 500 members of a pious association of lay Catholics were killed in battle by Spanish forces in the colonial Philippines. Surviving members of the group were questioned as to the purpose of their uprising; facing execution, they responded, “To pray.” My dissertation attempts to unpack this statement by placing the Cofradía in the broader history of the Church's response to expressions of popular piety. Under what circumstances are the devotional practices of the laity tolerated or incorporated into the Church, and under what conditions are they suppressed? Why was the Cofradía's membership determined to pray, up to the point of violent confrontation and death, and what made this desire so threatening to Spanish authorities that the group needed to be suppressed? What can this case tell us about the modern relationship between Church and State, religion and politics?

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

2023-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

Upcoming | "The Cofradía de San José in the longue durée of popular Catholicism." Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. November 2025.

"The Cofradía de San José and the Invention of 'Religion.'" Intellectual Crosscurrents in Southeast Asia workshop. UC Berkeley. April 2025.

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

Teaching Interests

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