Victoria Phillips

Victoria Phillips is the author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (OUP, 2020), which explores political life of modern dancer Martha Graham to promote the United States in over thirty nations for every presidential administration from Dwight D. Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush. At present, she is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center, and at Wolfson College and the Oxford University Centre for Life Writing where she will be working on her next book under contract, a biography of Eleanor Lansing Dulles. While at Columbia University’s European Institute, she developed and ran the Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty Fellowship, which became the Cold War Archival Research fellowship (CWAR). She taught Cold War culture at Columbia, and as a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), where she received the 2020-21 university award for Innovation in Teaching. She co-directs the Cold War Archival Research Institute (CWAR), the History, Culture and Diplomacy project at LSE, and History OnLine. She is chair of the Digital Resources and Archival Sharing for the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, co-founder of the Global Biography Working Group (Global.Bio), serves on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History board, the European Institute at Columbia University, and is on the 2023 Biographer’s International conference committee.

Her articles have appeared in as the New York Times, American Communist History, Dance Chronicle, Ballet News, Dance Research Journal, and Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. As a public historian, she has curated public exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and has lectured at renowned international universities, colleges, high schools, and global institutes, and appeared on radio and television. Her primary research is held at the Library of Congress as the Victoria Phillips Collection.