About

Amanda Phillips is an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in Art & Architectural History. She joined the department in 2015 after positions at the University of Birmingham and the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. Her scholarly work focuses on the circulation and consumption of art and objects in the Ottoman Empire, particularly Istanbul, between 1600 and 1800. Her first book, Everyday Luxuries, explores how the habits of men and women in Istanbul influenced the production of textiles, ceramics, metalware, woodwork, and arts of the book, emphasizing a broader view of Islamic art history beyond traditional elite focus. Her second monograph, Sea Change, published in 2021, examines Ottoman textiles from a global and interdisciplinary perspective, integrating social and economic history with art history and technical studies, and highlighting the agency of artisans in the textile sector. Her ongoing research involves analyzing collections across museums in Greece, Turkey, the UK, and the US, with a forthcoming project on the global language of flowers in textiles and crafts from the Ottoman court to vernacular decoration, especially focusing on textiles made and used by women. Her scholarship relies on close object analysis and has been supported by numerous prestigious foundations and institutions. At UVa, she offers courses on Islamic art and architecture, Mediterranean and West Asian art, and advises students interested in the material culture of the Islamic world, particularly the Ottoman Empire.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Media studies
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Communication
• Literature
• Multimedia
• Law
• Library science
• Linguistics
• Art history
• Business
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Crafts and Everyday Consumption

  BRILL eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Negg(at)ing the Game Studies Subject

  Feminist Media Histories · 2020 · 43 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This article traces a limited affective history of game studies in order to understand why marginalized scholars frequently feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in the field. Following the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, it digs into the inaugural issue of the journal Game Studies as well as the infamous narratology-versus-ludology debate to understand how the anxious and emotional rhetoric of the early game studies field imaginary created an environment hostile to the political perspectives of feminist studies and other political scholarly fields. It introduces the concept of “scholarly negging” to account for the gendered emotional manipulation enacted by men who seek to control the field's terms of conversation.

  PublisherDOI

• Weaving the History: Mystery of a City, edited by Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu and Gözde Çerçioğlu Yücel

  Turkish Historical Review · 2020-03-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Queerness in the Digital Age: A Scholarly Roundtable

  The Velvet Light Trap · 2020-09-01

  article

  <p>The Velvet Light Trap gathered a diverse group of scholars with a range of specialties related to queer theory and media. This round-table touches on everything from dating apps to the films of John Waters to a livestreamed Indigo Girls concert, demonstrating the myriad ways digitality has affected queer media, representation, and audiences. The researchers began this discussion on 9 March 2020, only for closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic to begin in earnest a few days later. Thus, the participants' contributions began to reflect this fraught period toward the end of the conversation.<br></p>

  PublisherDOI

• Gamer Trouble

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Complicating perspectives on diversity in video games Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble , Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect , Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.

  PublisherDOI

• Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture

  2020 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Complicating perspectives on diversity in video gamesGamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of "gamer" shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems.By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world

  Publisher

• Charlotte Jirousek with Sara Catterall, <i>Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange</i>

  Textile History · 2020-07-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Charlotte Jirousek with Sara Catterall, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange." Textile History, 51(2), pp. 262–263

  PublisherDOI

• Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities

  American Quarterly · 2018-01-01 · 15 citations

  articleSenior author

  Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities Christina Boyles (bio), Anne Cong-Huyen (bio), Carrie Johnston (bio), Jim McGrath (bio), and Amanda Phillips (bio) We want to believe that we can be agile and innovative, like Silicon Valley says it is, by making DH run with short-term grants, app contests, and temporary labor. We want to have a sort of Uber-style sharing economy for DH-research. But this is not how one supports careful, enduring scholarship and teaching. —Miriam Posner, "Money and Time" Despite the money and prestige that seems to come with the label, digital humanities is a field that relies on grants and temporary positions to establish credibility on campuses. As a result, DH laborers are frequently precarious across institutions. They occupy a startling range of positions: administrators, adjuncts, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, tenure-track and contingent faculty, librarians, archivists, programmers, IT and edtech specialists, consultants, museum curators, artists, authors, editors, and more. Members of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus, who work across other precarious fields like African American studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and more, recognize the many ways in which the value of our labor has been challenged, taken for granted, dismissed outright, or explained away as at best a fad or at worst the manifestation of neoliberalism in its most craven form within the humanities.1 These experiences have motivated us to make forms of digital labor and the agents behind this labor more visible, to create standards of evaluation that help practitioners and nonpractitioners define and describe the value of digital scholarship, and to sustain generative relationships that address the ethical dimensions of collaborative labor on digital humanities initiatives. It is our hope that this conversation can contribute to building solidarity with other precarious workers across the academy. [End Page 693] The Precarity of DH in and beyond American Studies Within American studies, students and faculty members interested in digital scholarship encounter many situations where support for digital labor could be greatly improved. While there has been compelling digital scholarship in American studies that takes a traditional form, collaborative, public-facing, and iterative digital scholarship proves challenging in environments that privilege the monograph. Consider the tenure-track faculty member required to print hard copies of born-digital scholarship far afield from the monograph, whose portfolio may be read by a department and an administration with no clear guidelines for how to promote the employees they hired to "do" digital work. Consider the graduate student encouraged to situate herself within digital humanities by completing digital projects in addition to a dissertation, taking on part-time positions, or even paying for additional credentials. While several humanities departments and professional organizations have taken steps to develop guidelines for professional evaluation of digital labor, these recommendations may not serve the varied forms of academic labor beyond the tenure-track model. How do we help members of the community interested in more creative or multimodal endeavors or forms—films, exhibitions, games, documentaries, oral histories—demonstrate the institutional and professional value of their labor to audiences who do not find its importance self-evident? Scholars looking for collaborators or material resources on campus may find their work challenged by the conditions of labor created by understaffing, particularly if a single employee is expected to serve a wide range of campus needs. Digital scholarship in American studies often involves the labor of experts who institutionally reside elsewhere on campus. Many of these individuals work in libraries, where they may collaborate with American studies students and faculty members. Others may be former American studies students who earned library degrees or gained employment in traditional or "alt-ac" roles. While some of these employees work in supportive environments where their time and expertise is valued or where their contributions to digital scholarship are visible and documented, this is not always the case. For example, Leigh Bonds and Alex Gil note that many experts in digital scholarship "have been given the mandate to coordinate and support digital scholarship at our institutions without being part of a fully-staffed center or institute" and are expected to operate as "miracle workers" on campus, performing as scholars, tech support, administrators, project...

  PublisherDOI

• Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction to the Special Issue - Queerness and Video Games).

  2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Amanda Phillips. Review of "Islamic Arts and Crafts: An Anthology" by Marcus Milwright.

  CAA Reviews · 2018-07-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hamish Simpson

  University of Edinburgh

  3 shared

• Alexis Lothian

  University of Maryland, College Park

  3 shared

• Pankaj Pankaj

  3 shared

• Anne Cong-Huyen

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Keith B. Woodford

  Lincoln University

  2 shared

• F.A. Beeson

  2 shared

• C. Perrone

  2 shared

• John Greer

  DairyNZ

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, English

  University of California Santa Barbara

  2014

• MA, English

  University of California Santa Barbara

  2009

• BA, English

  Rice University

  2007

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Commission
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Max Planck Foundation
• Marie Curie Foundation
• Gerda Henkel Stiftung