Contact Information

Office: 4179 JFSB

Phone: 422-2487

E-mail: phillip_snyder@byu.edu

Office Hours:
MWF 2:00-2:50
or by appointment

Phillip Snyder specializes in twentieth-century British and American literature and studies in autobiography. He is also developing a specialty in regional and ethnic American literatures, specifically Southern and Western literature, and teaches courses in all these areas on both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Professor Snyder considers himself a postmodernist with a strong secondary interest in feminism and narratology; his scholarship and course organization reflect these theoretical interests.

He has taught at BYU since 1988. His courses require students to think for themselves and to make substantial contributions to class discussion. Because he encourages his students to write with conference presentation and publication in mind, many of them have presented their term papers at conferences and several have had their papers published.

Professor Snyder did his doctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; his dissertation was "Constructional Codes in the Kunstlerroman: Sons and Lovers and Look Homeward, Angel as Exemplars," with Professor Linda Kauffman serving as his adviser. He has published articles on a variety of subjects and authors, including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Marge Piercy, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Wolfe.

While at BYU Professor Snyder has received an NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship, an Alcuin Fellowship in General Education, Student Alumni Association Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and a Redd Center Research Assistant Award. He is active in several academic societies and is co-director of the Society for Studies in American Autobiography as well as a board member of the Utah Western Heritage Foundation.

Degrees