Announcing the 2022 HSS Student Prizewinners

The Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to present its prize recipients for the 2021–2022 academic year.

Gordon McClure Memorial Communications Prize in English
Margaret (Maggie) Lee (BS '22, Electrical Engineering and English (minor)), "Controlling the Female Body: Obsession and Loss of Autonomy in Lolita and ‘Berenice'"

Gordon McClure Memorial Communications Prize in History
Elia Gorokhovsky, "The Development of the Research Journal and the Prehistory of Peer Review in the ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'"

Gordon McClure Memorial Communications Prize in Philosophy
Elsa Palumbo, "Happiness is Hedonic: In Defense of a Subjective Account of Well-Being"

Hallett Smith Prize
Shalini Kurinchi-Vendhan, "‘Middlemarch' by George Eliot: Dorothea the Dryad"

Mary A. Earl McKinney Prize in Poetry
Lily DeBell, "Titanium is my Favorite Metal because it is the Hardest Metal"

Mary A. Earl McKinney Prize in Prose Fiction
Margaret (Maggie) Sui, "The Claytons"

Eleanor Searle Prize in Law, Politics, and Institutions
Abigail (Abby) Jiang

Alexander P. and Adelaide F. Hixon Prize for Writing
Avirath (Avi) Sundaresan, "WALL-E: Wisdom: Lessons for Public Policy in the Age of AI" and "Towards Race-Conscious Medical AI"

John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science
Ke Shi, "Venture Capital: A Tale of Three Networks"

To learn more about the history of each HSS prize and see a list of winners from the last five years, click here.

At Caltech's commencement ceremony, the Institute also honored these students who completed an HSS option or minor:

Merck Index Award
Yun Emily Du (BS '22, Chemistry and History and Biology (minor))

Mabel Beckman Prize
Isabel Swafford (BS '22, Astrophysics and English (minor))

Updated October 2022