Wyatt Phillips

What are your current research interests?

My interests largely revolve around the political economic influences and industrial structures that determined 20th and now 21st century media practices, particularly in the U.S. Initially this intersected with my longer-standing interests in film genre, and that still is true (and the topic of my book project), but the kinds of research questions I'm interested in now engage all kinds of aspects related to film and media production, circulation, and reception. For instance, the projects I'm currently working on range from 1960s television, to forms of risk management potentially available to film investors, to American Independent Cinema.

What types of outreach and engagement have you been involved with?

Prior to COVID, I had been the director and co-programmer of the Alamo Film Club, a film screening and discussion group that met every Wednesday night at 7:30p all year long to watch a movie – either a new release or a repertory title – and then stuck around in the theater after the film to discuss it. Our programming ranged from independent films, to global cinema, to documentaries (and beyond) – so long as we thought the film could open out onto discussion. The screenings regularly intersected with courses being taught by myself or other members of the Film and Media Studies faculty or by friends and colleagues across the university. Our students were highly encouraged to attend and participate – ideally opening their horizons beyond just the films and ideas related to individual courses. This space was a true meeting of university and community members, as many of our regulars had no direct connection to TTU. Over the course of about five years, I introduced and led the discussion of over 100 films, some of which also involved filmmaker Q&As either with the filmmakers present or participating remotely. In addition, in 2019 I was the co-founder of the Lubbock Children's Literature and Film Festival. With COVID, we have delayed the planning for a second fest, but are looking forward to determining how to bring this back to the families of Lubbock and the South Plains.

Why did you choose this field?

My father was a huge fan of movies, mostly Hollywood films, so I grew up understanding how they were part and parcel of the culture. I initially took a very different path, though. My undergraduate work was in aerospace engineering and I even started a graduate degree in that field before dropping that career path to make low-budget movies with my brother. In the process of learning how to make films, we also became very interested in a much wider array of cinema – global cinema and especially American independent films. After about five years of doing that (including making a 16mm feature film) while also working as a cook to pay the bills, I decided I wanted to study the history and theory of cinema full time in order to make better movies. I applied for and was accepted to NYU's MA program in Cinema Studies and after a year there I knew I loved the study of films even more than I'd enjoyed the process of making them. I expected to find that I would love teaching and like the research, but once I started there as a PhD student I found instead that I really love the research part as well.

How do you define good teaching?

For me, good teaching is about sharing the passion for both the object of study and the desire to ask questions about it. I love seeing the “a-ha” moments in my students, whether it is in a sophomore in my Intro to Film Studies class who realizes for the first time that the camera angle carries meaning, or in a PhD student working on their dissertation who turns a corner in their research that opens up new horizons for them as a scholar. As such, I think that a key part of my job as a teacher is giving students the tools to answer the questions they have, as well as helping to provide strategies to discover questions they had never previously thought to ask.

What is your proudest professional accomplishment?

Hmmm. The best answer I can come up with here is probably related to the balance I've been able to create and maintain across and within my professional life. Having just recently received tenure, I am proud of the balance between my community service, my teaching, and my research, but also balancing the part of my life that exists outside of the “job” with my family. In terms of professional accomplishments, I am extremely thankful that I'm able to have a career that I love and that I regularly find fulfilling. And a key part of that corresponds to the outreach portion – sharing the joy that I find in viewing and thinking about films of all kinds (from Hollywood fare to films that explicitly work to challenge and expand our ideas) with others is something I really feel is a privilege to be able to do. I don't think of this kind of community outreach as part of my job, but rather something that having this job allows and enables me to do!

How do you integrate research and outreach into teaching?

What is great about the kind of research and especially the outreach I do is that it dovetails very well with the object of study central to most of my courses. In fact, these elements really can and do inform each other so that films that are important to my classes can show up in my community outreach. At the same time, the regularity and breadth of that outreach can open new vistas for students. I am a strong believer in the idea that there is no better time in a person's life to expand their horizons than the years they are in college, and watching films that present aspects of the world you haven't been exposed to or ideas you haven't previously considered – and then discussing them in an exploratory and supportive environment – can expand on the classroom experience and transfer the kinds of critical thinking that a humanities-based, liberal arts education is built upon into other aspects of their life outside the class. 

More about Wyatt Phillips

Born and raised in Texas, Wyatt Phillips used to drive through Lubbock regularly on trips from Austin to the Colorado mountains. But he never expected to live and work here. After studying aerospace engineering as an undergraduate at UT and then leaving his first stint in grad school at Cornell to move back to Austin to make low/no-budget movies, he moved to New York City to attend NYU's Cinema Studies graduate program. Expecting to stay for two years, he was there for eleven (getting both an MA and PhD from NYU in the process) before joining Texas Tech's Department of English first as a Visiting Assistant Professor and then as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies. Now with tenure, he looks forward to continuing to build on the success he has already experienced here at Texas Tech. He and his wife Robin, who works for TTU as well as the Director of Development in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and their two children are happy to live and work in a place where they feel fortunate to have found so many good friends and colleagues.