[1][2] Phillippy was awarded a BA and an MA from The Johns Hopkins University.

[3] Her doctoral thesis was entitled Love's Remedies: Palinodic Discourse in Renaissance Literature.

From 1989 to 2010 Phillippy was a faculty member at Texas A&M University, as an Assistant, Associate, and full Professor.

[4] She received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to complete her book Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

She gave her inaugural lecture, 'Memory and Matter: Lady Anne Clifford’s “Life of Mee"', on 3 November 2020 on memory and materiality in the archive of Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676).