Fellowship winners will study next at Oxford and Cambridge

Ten Yale seniors and a Yale College alumna have been awarded fellowships from a variety of organizations for graduate study at Oxford and Cambridge universities. These are in addition to students, previously announced in YaleNews, who have won Rhodes, Marshall, and Gates-Cambridge Scholarships.

The fellowship winners and their awards are:

Emma Brodey ’21 has been awarded the King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in English at Cambridge University, where she will study 18th-century and Romantic literature and the history of the book. At Yale, she is an English major focusing her studies on 19th-century English literature and creative nonfiction. Her academic thesis explored Jane Austen and George Eliot’s novels through the lens of material texts and the embodiment of the 19th-century woman reader. Her creative thesis was a memoir about the role of Austen in her own family. Brodey has also studied letterpress printing, helps lead the Yale Guild of Bookmakers, and often teaches bookbinding workshops for the Yale community. She works as a research assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her most recent curated exhibit, “Publication and Prejudice” focuses on copies of “Pride and Prejudice” in the Yale Library collections.

Serena Cho ’21 has been awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history at Cambridge University. At Yale, Cho majored in the humanities and ethics, politics and economics. She is interested in rhetoric, deliberative democracy, and the public sphere and has tried to bring together the depth of political theory with her practical understanding of the media landscape. She reported on the university president’s office for the Yale Daily News and later served as the paper’s managing editor. At Cambridge, she hopes to build on her senior essay, which examined the qualities that citizens must possess to engage productively in politics and investigated how the media can contribute to their cultivation. During her time at Yale, Cho was also a research assistant in the philosophy department, a freelancer for various magazines and newspapers, and a fellow at the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Maria Gargiulo ’19 has been awarded a Rotary Global Grant to pursue an M.Phil. in sociology and demography in Nuffield College at Oxford University. Gargiulo majored in statistics and data science and Spanish. Currently, she is a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in San Francisco. In her work, she uses statistical methods to bring clarity to instances of mass violence, especially in situations where data is incomplete. During her time at Yale, Gargiulo researched sexual violence in armed conflict, worked as a teaching assistant for multiple statistics classes, and served on the Statistics and Data Science Departmental Student Advisory Committee. She also conducted fieldwork on intimate partner violence in León, Nicaragua, and completed a Civic Digital Fellowship at the U.S. Census Bureau. During her M.Phil., Gargiulo plans to examine the population health impacts of feminicide in Latin America.

Meghanlata Gupta ’21 received the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Graduate Scholarship, which will support her in pursuing a Master of Studies in U.S. history at the University of Oxford. A citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, her work focuses on Native American and Indigenous histories, educational advocacy efforts, and journalistic storytelling techniques. At Yale, she is an Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellow and former president of the Association of Native Americans at Yale. She is also the founder of Indigenizing the News, a digital organization dedicated to Indigenous news and contemporary experiences.

Henry Jacob ’21 has been awarded the Henry Fellowship to obtain an M.Phil. in world history at Cambridge, where he will continue working on his project about Panama’s role as a cynosure of imperial designs across centuries and empires. Jacob is majoring in history and pursuing a certificate in Spanish. His writing has appeared in The Latin Americanist, a peer-reviewed journal, among other outlets. Outside of research, Jacob leads academic endeavors geared towards social change, including The 1701 Project, an ongoing discourse devoted to the history of racism at Yale and in America. He serves as the editor in chief of The Yale Historical Review and is the founding president of the Society of Undergraduate Humanities Publications, a global consortium of over 60 journals. This year, Jacob created Publish and Prosper, an organization that guides high school and college students through the process of establishing a journal. After participating in the Tsai CITY Accelerator this spring, he anticipates developing this venture further at Cambridge.

Selena Lee ’21 has received the Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in population health at Cambridge University. She is majoring in sociology with a concentration in health and society. Throughout her time at Yale, Lee has been involved with research on social networks in the Christakis lab, receiving several fellowships to pursue this work. She is ultimately interested in leveraging complex patterns of social interactions for public health interventions. In addition to her research, she has been involved with several publications on campus, most recently as the editor in chief of the Yale Undergraduate Research Journal and previously as an editor and staff reporter for the Yale Daily News. She has served as a project head and volunteer for the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project and was a co-concertmaster of the Berkeley College Orchestra.

Michaellah Mapotaringa ’21 will pursue a master’s degree in African studies at Oxford as both a Clarendon Fund Scholar and an Oxford-Patrick Duncan Graduate Scholar. She is majoring in history and African studies with a focus on post-colonial African history. She is from Harare, Zimbabwe. At Yale, Mapotaringa split her time between the international students' community and the African students' community, serving as a World Fellow Liaison, a peer liaison for the Office of International Students and Scholars, the 2019 head counselor for orientation for international students, president of the Yale African Students Association, a student dining hall manager in Timothy Dwight College, and the vice president of diversity and inclusion for The Women's Network-Yale chapter. She also served as an instructor for the Yale Young African Scholars program.

Keshav Raghavan ’21 is studying applied mathematics, history, and human rights. With the support of the Henry Fellowship, he will pursue the master’s degree in applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge. As a mathematical scientist, Raghavan is interested in using computational methods to tackle difficult problems in the physical sciences. After finishing his master’s degree, he will undertake graduate research in the same subject. Raghavan is also concerned with understanding and mitigating the adverse impacts of scientific and technological progress on society. Today this encompasses issues like algorithmic discrimination and data insecurity. He has studied these questions as a student fellow at the Information Society Project and as a member of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. As a historian, his published work focuses on the strategic and technical legacies of the Second World War. Outside of the classroom at Yale, Raghavan has served as city editor and staff reporter at the Yale Daily News; led a project to launch a research satellite into low-Earth orbit with Yale Aerospace; and served on several university committees. He is currently involved in computational astrophysics research, volunteers with the Yale Community Kitchen, and plays squash on the club team.

Antoinette Roberts ’21 has been awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in the history of art at Cambridge University. She is majoring in both African American studies and the history of art, At Yale, Roberts has been a Saybrook College aide, a volunteer tutor at New Haven Reads, the Goodyear Intern at the Yale University Art Gallery, and head guide of the Yale Center for British Art’s student guide program. Her senior thesis, entitled “Third Meaning: The Text-Image Art of Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Ingrid Pollard” explores notions of identity, representation, memory, and history in the work of Black British and African American women artists. She hopes to work as a curator at an art museum following the completion of her M.Phil.

Karen Tai ’21 has been awarded a Rotary Global Grant Scholarship and Oxford Nuffield Department of Population Health graduate scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global health science and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She will graduate from Yale with a B.S./M.S. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and has worked in the lab of Yale scientist Valentina Greco. Her research focuses on understanding how tissues tolerate cells with cancer-causing mutations while remaining clinically normal. Her scientific contributions have been published in journals including Nature and Journal of Cell Biology. At Yale, Tai is a volunteer at HAVEN Free Clinic and has served in leadership positions for the Yale Hunger & Homelessness Action Project and Yale Undergraduate Science Olympiad. She also co-founded STEM and Health Equity Advocates to implement anti-racist education and uplift underrepresented students in STEM and pre-health fields. A teaching fellow and member of Phi Beta Kappa, Tai hopes to synthesize her interdisciplinary interests to lead reform efforts in healthcare that address health inequities and improve cancer diagnostics and treatment.

Helen Zhao ’21 has been awarded the Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in philosophy at Cambridge University. She is majoring in philosophy and ethics, politics and economics at Yale. Her senior thesis was an argument for the philosophical reconciliation of mercy and retributive justice in the criminal law, and she intends to focus primarily on ethics and philosophy of law at Cambridge. During her time on campus she has worked in the admissions office as a senior interviewer, as a peer tutor in economics and math, and as a research assistant at Yale Law School. She has spent much of her time at Yale directing and dancing in productions with the Yale Ballet Company.