Philip M. Hicks and Susan Snyder Awards
2021 Hicks Prize for Literary Criticism
1st Prize
Eva Baron '22: As We Utter "I Am": Contrastive Irony, Proximity, and Language as Minor Literature in Sui Sin Far's In the Land of the Free
2nd Prize
Nicole Liu '21: Touching Sectarian Violence through Things in Michael Longley's Poems
Honorable Mention
Kadiata Diallo '21: Ivah's Hanging: Mourning While in Charge
The Hicks prizes are endowed by friends of Philip M. Hicks, former Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of English Literature.
2021 Snyder Prize for Best Critical Essay by a First-Year Student
1st Prize
Ben Sperber '24: Living, Buying, Dying: The Nature of Modern Death and Capitalism in White Noise
2nd Prize
Adithi Attada '24: Challenging Colonialism: Plays as Mechanism to Challenge Colonialism in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
The Snyder prize is funded by the Department of English Literature in memory of Susan Snyder, distinguished Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature and Chairman of the Department.
More about the Susan Snyder Prize
Susan Snyder was a Renaissance scholar, and a valued teacher in the Department of English Literature at Swarthmore for 24 years. Her books include editions of A Winter’s Tale & All’s Well That Ends Well; an edited collection of essays on Othello; the monographs The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, 1979; Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton, 1998; and Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2002. The Snyder prize celebrates her dedication to the scholar’s life as a model for our students’ work in criticism.
