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Humanities Division
History of Consciousness Department
PhD Candidate
Graduate
Humanities Building 1
315
History Of Consciousness
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.
My dissertation, Contesting Catholic Modernity: Popular Religion and Late Spanish Empire in the Philippines, is an extended case study of the violent suppression of the Cofradía de San José, a pious association of lay Catholics in the early 19th-century Philippines. I use this case as a vehicle to explore the emergence of “religion” as conceptually and institutionally central to modernity. While theories of modernity have tended to foreground its Protestant lineage, my dissertation examines the period from the Reformation to the mid-19th century to show the ways that Catholicism, too, has shaped and been shaped by modernity. The case of the Cofradía de San José demonstrates how Catholicism became a modern religion in ways that both differ from and coincide with dominant trends, and how this process was contested among Catholics themselves. Employing extensive research in Spanish and Tagalog archives, I identify three trends in the development of Catholic modernity, and I analyze how the Cofradía challenged these developments. First, I argue that Catholic imperial expansion produced a modern, secular separation between Church and State, while the Cofradía stymied Spanish authorities by crossing and exploiting these jurisdictional boundaries. Second, I demonstrate how Tridentine Catholicism’s effort to promote orthodoxy and restrain certain devotional practices created the modern distinction between “elite” and “popular” religion, while the Cofradía cuts across the binaries— urban/rural, wealth/poverty, textual/oral, orthodox/heterodox—that distinguish these poles. Thirdly, while Catholic reformers were encouraging an interior and individual form of piety, consonant with the modern state’s mandate for individual citizens’ subjection to its centralized power, the Cofradía employed an organizational form that was corporate and based on collective obedience. The Cofradía thus demonstrates how Catholicism participated in the emergence of modernity, and how lay Catholics in the Philippines contested this emergence.
HISC 85 - Politics and Religion
HISC 123 - What Is Belief? Mystics, Heretics, and Aliens
2026-Teaching Fellowship, History of Consciousness Department
2025-Chancellor's Dissertation Quarter Fellowship, UCSC
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
Upcoming | "Philippine Confraternities in Global-Historical Context." Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Denver, CO. November 2026.
"How to Get off Your Phone: Catholic Mystic Technologies of Discipline." American Academy of Religion Western Region Annual Meeting. Las Vegas, NV. March 2026.
"Unpopular Catholicism: The Case of the Cofradía de San José." Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Boston, MA. 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.
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.
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