Philip M. Hicks and Susan Snyder Awards
2020 Hicks Prize for Literary Criticism
1st Prize
Reuben Gelley Newman '21: The Violent Apotheosis of Yeats's Swan Imagery
2nd Prize
Lauren Chung '20: Senior Honors Study
The Hicks prizes are endowed by friends of Philip M. Hicks, former Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of English Literature.
2020 Snyder Prize for Best Critical Essay by a First-Year Student
1st Prize
Simon Herz '23: All the World's a Stage: Thoughts on the Theme of Theatrics in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead"
2nd Prize
Sofia Sears '23: Trauma-Time: Emptiness as Witness in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric
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.
