Phillip Round’s research and teaching in American literature focuses on material practices and discursive crossings. Each of his three books approaches literary practice from within very different contexts. The first, By Nature and By Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620-1660 (UPNE, 1999), explores the discursive dimensions of England’s Great Migration to the new world. The second, The Impossible Land: Story and Place in California’s Imperial Valley (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), focuses on the American southwest, detailing how human beings use discourse to orient themselves to the land. His most recent book, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), examines the textual cultures that emerged in Native American communities as they mobilized literacy, books, and print in their struggle against the European occupation of their homelands. Removable Type was awarded the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize in 2011. In 2013, he was honored with a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

As a member of the University of Iowa’s Native American and Indigenous Studies program for the past 20 years, Phillip has dedicated his teaching and research to the exploration of indigenous literatures and literacies. In 2006, he was given the University of Iowa Office of Student Life’s “Outstanding Faculty” Award in recognition of “significant accomplishments, initiatives, innovations . . . in contributing to the preservation and well-being of the Latino/Native American Cultural Center.” He remains dedicated to diversifying the English Department’s curriculum and to educating himself about new pedagogies and practices that will help him to sustain more equitable classroom environments and to support constructive discussions around issues of diversity and inclusion.