Michael Phillips is a scholar of American race relations, Texas history, right-wing politics, and apocalyptic religions.   

Phillips grew up in Garland, Texas. He received a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1983 and worked at various newspapers in North Texas, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in the 1980s. 

 After earning his master’s degree in history from the University of California at Riverside in 1994, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His dissertation won the University of Texas at Austin Outstanding Dissertation Award and was published as White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, That book won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history.

From 2007 to 2022, Phillips taught American history at Collin College in Plano. In 2019 he was named one of the first group of community college professors to receive a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to study the history of the eugenics movement in the state of Texas. 

He has served as an historical consultant for and appeared in the award-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination and its long-term impact on Dallas, City of Hate. He was also an adviser and appears in a series of short films about Dallas history, Recovering the Stories, periodically broadcast on Channel 13 and available on the KERA website. In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. As a result of that research, he most recently co-authored, with Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas History, published by the University of Oklahoma Press on June 3. You can read his thoughts on politics, the world, and life in Texas at drmphillips2001.substack.com. Subscriptions are free.

In 2022-2023, he became a senior research fellow at SMU.  In 2025, the University of Oklahoma Press published a book he co-authored with Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas.

He is now retired but keeps busy.  He serves as the communication chair for Human Rights Dallas.  He is working on a new book he’s tentatively calling Whitewash: One Texas Professor’s Battle for Free Speech.  He describes it as a combination memoir and history of censorship in Texas.