Philip Mogen is a historian of early modern Britain, Europe and the Atlantic world. His scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary questions related to how media shape the ways in which individuals make sense of and explain their world. Whether today, with digital media platforms proliferating, or in early modern Europe, which faced its own forms of “information overload,” the medium through which content was read, listened to, or viewed has always been central to understanding its meaning. His research also addresses a corollary of this: how individuals have developed the tools to navigate complex media cultures.

He is currently completing a number of projects, including a book building off his dissertation, on knowledge circulation in early modern Britain. These projects focus on the rise of serial printed news during the 17th century and the way individuals sought to make sense of it; as well as on innovations in the recycling of pamphlet literature during the 1640s and 1650s and their impact on perceptions of the past. Other work includes an essay on bookselling practices in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake (Winter 2022, Early American Studies) as well as another on the relationship between engraving and literacy in 1720s London through the prism of a manuscript recipe book.

Mogen received a BA in English and History from the College of William and Mary, a Masters in Book History from the University of St. Andrews, and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Rice, he managed programming at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

He teaches undergraduate courses in early modern British and European history as well as the history of books and other communication technologies.

Fall 2026 Courses:

HIST 270 - Reformations: Religious Change in the Early Modern World
HIST 403 - Advanced Research Seminar  

Spring 2027 Courses:

HIST 361 - A History of Premodern Britain: Tudors and Stuarts, 1485 – 1707
HIST 404 - Advanced Research Seminar