Biographical Note
Victoria Phillips is an adjunct lecturer in history at the European Institute and Associated Faculty at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. She specializes in Cold War history, United States cultural diplomacy, and international relations. Phillips created and directs the Cold War Archival Research Project (CWAR), which takes advanced undergraduate and graduate students to archives in the United States and Europe in order to develop new scholarship on the cultural Cold War. Her book with Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2019) titled Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy explores the export of modern dance as American soft power to more than twenty-five contested nations between 1955 and 1989. Her articles have appeared in publications from the New York Times and American Communist History, to Ballet News and Dance Research Journal. In 2006, she curated the exhibition “Dance Is a Weapon” in Paris, which toured France for two years. At the Library of Congress, she co-curated “Politics and the Dancing Body” as well as an exhibit commemorating the 75th anniversary of American Ballet Theatre. She serves on the editorial board for American Communist History.
Phillips was born June 4, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts. Growing up in New York City, she studied ballet, modern dance, and French baroque dance as a child, and became a professional dancer at the age of twelve, touring with Wendy Hilton and performing on stage and television as Queen Esther with Anna Sokolow. She studied with Martha Graham and learned the company repertory before retiring to attend college full-time at Columbia University. While working at the Columbia Business School, she received a bachelor's degree in literature and writing in 1985. She entered the Business School the following year, and became a summer intern at Mitsui Bank in Tokyo, Japan, where she was first published in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Returning to the United States, she took a job as a hedge fund manager buying and selling distressed debt securities. Developing an expertise in short-selling, she transferred to the equities side, retiring in 1993 to raise her three children. As a “stay-at-home mother,” she received the master's degree in fine arts in creative writing followed by the master of arts in history and performance studies from New York University. Her creative writing was published by journals in the United States and Italy. A chapter of her master's thesis, "Collaboration among Divas," was published in Ballet Review.
Upon entering the doctoral program in U.S. history at Columbia University, Phillips wrote her master's thesis on the Soviet influence on American modern dance and the arts during the interwar, later published by American Communist History. When the previously sealed archives of Martha Graham opened, Phillips recalled Graham’s stance as an apolitical artist and changed her dissertation topic, upon finding a myriad of government reports, invitations, and other correspondence with Graham. More than a decade later, the discovery led to numerous oral histories and archival searches in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, her dissertation, and the publication of her book.
While a doctoral candidate, Phillips developed an academic course on U.S. cultural diplomacy as a University Teaching Fellow under Professor Eric Foner. Her further work with Alan Brinkley in United States history and Carol Gluck and the Weatherhead Institute led to an appointment as a lecturer at the European Institute under Victoria de Grazia upon graduation. At the European Institute with de Grazia, the Cultural Initiative and studies of soft power led to conferences and the development of three of Phillips’s courses, one of which directly addresses the intersection of hard and soft power. Through the CWAR program, Phillips collaborates with West Point Military Academy and its Civil Military Institute, as well as Corvinus University in Budapest and the London School of Economics. Phillips developed her course titled “Women as Cold War Weapons.”
Phillips continues to explore U.S. global cultural projects in the Cold War from the radios to bubblegum trading cards, and CIA projects of strategy and tactics that involve film, books, balloon leaflet campaigns, and other exports.
Phillips has also served on the boards of the Joyce Theater and American Ballet Theatre, and currently, on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the European Institute at Columbia University.