Awards for Excellent Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Awards for Excellent Undergraduate and Graduate Students
The awards and honors listed below were announced at the dean's convocation and bestowed on the students by the department at this year's senior luncheon. Our award system recognizes three equally important categories of accomplishment by our students: Citizenship and Engagement, Academic Excellence in the UG program, and Academic Excellence in the Honors program. The department also honors the best of its graduate student teaching assistants with a Teaching Excellence award. For more about the awards and the significance of their namesakes, check out the website here.
OSCARS (aka UG-Awards) IN NU PHILOSOPHY OF THE YEAR 2026:
Engagement & Citizenship Awards
The LULA A PETERSON prize for exemplary citizenship for the philosophy major honors students who have gone far beyond the call of duty in their functions and organizing activities to truly create positive and needed atmospheric and social changes in our department. This year’s award goes to Nora Schilling.
By it, the department recognizes their exemplary leadership and continuous energetic engagement in the department’s MAP-UG chapter, as mediator of cooperations between the philosophy department’s UG organizations and in the remaining UG-organizations in the department for the benefit of NU-PHIL’s UG community.
The RUTH BARCAN MARCUS award—acknowledging their engagement in fostering equity among students in the formal sciences by teaching and mentoring students who are traditionally underrepresented and underserved in formal science instruction—for tutoring in formal logic goes to Danielle Jing & Sol Liliana Rivera.
At this year’s Senior Marshal for the Philosophy department at the Graduation ceremonies, we designated (for her continued engagement in the community and innovative and energetic initiatives around the PHIL UG-community) Veronica Rubin for this honor.
Academic Awards in the undergraduate program
The CHARLES W MILLS prize for the best short paper (up to 5 pages) of the year written by a student in a philosophy class goes to Brecken Mary Vanlonkhuyzen for their paper “A Defense of Locke’s Abstract Ideas” (instructor: Baron Reed in PHIL 210-3, Spring 2025).
The STEPHEN WHITE prize for the best paper written by a student in their first or second year goes to Siying Li for their paper “Tiresias, Bigfoot, and Security Dogs: What Kant Can and Cannot Say about Prophecy” (Instructor Rachel Zuckert in PHIL 313-1, Spring 2025).
The BRENTANO prize for the best paper written by a student in their third or fourth year goes in equal parts to Kylie Hu for their paper "Objectivity and Public Participation in Science” (instructor: Morgan Thompson in PHIL 355, Winter 2026) & Grace Seo for their paper "The Agency Cultivation Model” (instructor: Baron Reed PHIL 240, Spring 2025).
The DAVID HULL PRIZE for the best senior thesis of the academic year goes to Veronica Rubin for their thesis "Is the Trad Wife Secretly Woke? Insights from Recent Trends in Influencer Culture on the Value of Domestic Labor” (supervisor: Claire Kirwin).
This year’s STEPHEN TOULMIN PRIZE honoring superior overall achievement throughout all courses in their undergraduate career as major and amount of engagement in philosophy courses (measured by the GPA in philosophy, number and type of credits and other accomplishments for a graduating philosophy major) is awarded to Nora Schilling.
Awards and Distinctions in the Honors Program
Upon the HONKOM’s recommendation, the WCAS Committee for Honors and Excellent Students conferred HONORS IN PHILOSOPHY to
- Veronica Rubin for their excellent work in the honors program, excellent accomplishments as a philosophy major, and their accomplished work in the thesis "Is The Trad Wife Secretly Woke? Insights from Recent Trends in Influencer Culture on the Value of Domestic Labor” (supervisor Claire Kirwin).
- Nora Schilling for their excellent work in the honors program, very good accomplishments as a philosophy major, and their accomplished work in the interdisciplinary thesis "Paragons of Environmental Virtue: Cultivating the virtuous qualities of self-suspension and affective attention through Nature writing” (supervisor Chad Horne).
- Jackson Lazar Stein for their excellent work in the honors program, very good accomplishments as a philosophy major, and their accomplished work in the thesis "Bounded Cost Benefit Framework for Aviation: Guardrails for Safety" (supervisor Chad Horne).
Graduate teaching award
Finally, the departmental Thomas A. McCarthy Award for Excellence in Teaching by a philosophy graduate teaching assistant was awarded to Gabriel Sánchez Ainsa for recognition by both the department and his students.