Phillip Maciak

Phillip Maciak

Senior Lecturer in English and American Culture Studies
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
MA, University of Virginia
BA, Amherst College

contact info:

office hours:

  • Wednesday 11:30-1:00, or by appointment

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    CB 1122
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Phillip Maciak writes and teaches about U.S. literature, visual media, and the idiosyncratic role of screens in our lives today.

Phillip Maciak teaches in the English Department and the American Culture Studies program. He’s also the TV editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a freelance cultural critic, and the author of Avidly Reads Screen Time, forthcoming in Spring 2023 from NYU Press. 

Maciak teaches a variety of courses in both English and AMCS. In English, he regularly teaches “The Great American Novel,” “A Star is Born: Literature and Celebrity,” and “Modern Texts and Contexts,” one of the two required survey courses for the English Major. In AMCS, he often teaches “The Visible and the Invisible: Introduction to American Visual Culture Studies,” and “Hot Takes: Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age.” He’s also a major advisor for American Culture Studies. 

These latter courses build upon Maciak’s experience as a cultural critic himself. In addition to his work at The Los Angeles Review of Books, his essays and reviews have appeared in Slate, The New Republic, n+1, and many other outlets.  

His book, Avidly Reads Screen Time, is a work of cultural criticism, cultural history, and personal essay about the way we define screens — and the way screens define us — in the twenty-first century. It will be published by NYU Press in 2023. 

He’s also the author of The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), a scholarly monograph about popular religious culture, early cinema, and American literature at the turn of the twentieth century.    

Recent Courses

L14 E Lit 302 / “The Great American Novel”

What is the Great American Novel? This is a question that has been hotly debated for decades, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner to Toni Morrison. It's a question with a hundred answers and no answers at all-a question of taste, of prejudice, of time. But what is a "Great American Novel"? What does it look like? What do we expect of it? What have Americans throughout history wanted it to say about America? These are questions we can, and will, answer in this course. As elusive a thing as the Great American Novel has been, the idea of the Great American Novel has a long and fascinating history that mirrors all the major movements of American literature from the American Renaissance to the present. Piecing together the story of this dream, this cultural quest with all of its inclusions and exclusions, is a way of telling a shadow history of American society. The Great American Novel tradition is something like a fossil record of America's shifting norms in relation to race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, democracy, citizenship, immigration, labor, capitalism, and war. And so each presumptive Great American Novel is a new variation in an evolving genre and a new thesis statement of American grandiosity or guilt. By cataloguing shared themes, conventions, and preoccupations, and by paying close attention to a handful of likely-and unlikely-candidates, this course will big questions about American exceptionalism, American tragedy, and the role of art in American culture. Authors will likely include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

    L14 E Lit 166 / “A Star is Born: Literature and Celebrity”

    It's easy to imagine literature as a hermetically-sealed art form, functioning outside, above, or beyond the petty, gossipy flows of popular culture. But the culture of celebrity has long been both a subject and spark for literary writers. This course tracks the long, intertwined history of fame and literary production from the eighteenth century to the present, Lord Byron to Kim Kardashian. We'll read novels and poems about celebrity, learn about literary celebrities both immortal and forgotten, and study the ways in which the emergence of various media (from print to photography to film and television and social media) have forced literary writers to reckon with the type of visibility that fame bestows on the famous. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only

      Selected Publications

      The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019.)

      “The Televisual Novel,” in American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

      “’A Rare and Wonderful Sight’: Secularism and Visual Historiography in Ben-Hur,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 3.2 (2015): 249-275.

      “The Time of the Semipublic Intellectual,” with Lili Loofbourow, PMLA, 130.2 March 2015.

      “Kill the Leading Man: Two Histories of 21st Century Television,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2013.

      “Spectacular Realism: The Ghost of Jesus Christ in D.W. Griffith’s Vision of History,” Adaptation, Volume 5, Issue 2, September 2012.

      in the news:

      Arts & Sciences lecturer, national TV critic writes new book on screen time

      What Are You Teaching in Spring 2021? with Phil Maciak, Lecturer in English and American Culture Studies

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