2007 Margaret Church MFS Memorial Prize

The Editors are pleased to announce the winner of the 2007 Margaret Church Memorial Prize for the best essay to appear in MFS. The Church Prize was established in 1984 in memory of Dr. Church, professor of English and comparative literature at Purdue University and a longtime editor of this journal.

The winner for 2007 is Carey Snyder, author of “‘When the Indian Was in Vogue’: D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest”, which appeared in volume 53, issue 4 (pages 662–96).

Special thanks to Paul A. Bové (University of Pittsburgh) for choosing this year’s winner. In making his selection, Prof. Bové writes,

Carey Snyder’s essay, “‘When the Indian Was in Vogue’: D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest,” is an excellent example of rigorous literary criticism that has transcended the old formal distinctions between high and low culture by combining careful textual analysis, epistemological reflection, and archival research. Professor Snyder’s essay develops cross-cultural and multi-national analysis in ways that illuminate the workings of early relations between the local, the regional, the national, and the imperial/global. The essay is a solid contribution to the scholarship of canonical figures and emerging topics, precisely the sort of modernizing readings the best criticism provides.

Prof. Snyder, who teaches at Ohio University, received $300 and a certificate, a copy of which appears here.