The Rhodes Trust announced today this year’s 32 American winners of the Rhodes Fellowship. Princeton had 3 winners — two seniors and one graduate — ranking only behind Yale in the number of awardees, which had 4.
Below are their profiles, as announced by the Rhodes Trust:
Joseph W. Barrett, Port Washington, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University
in June with a major in History and a minor in South Asian Studies. He won the highest
award for undergraduates, based on scholarship, character and leadership, as well as the prize
for the best thesis in American History. Joe is passionate about prison education and reform,
an issue he focused on as a freshman and that led him to establish a program on incarceration
issues at Princeton that he has expanded to other colleges. He has worked with the
Millennium Challenge Corporation in Lesotho, spent a year learning Hindu [sic] and Urdu and
working on literacy projects in Varanasi, India, and is passionate about social justice and
economic development. Joe plans to do the M.Phil. in Economic and Social History at
Oxford.
Rachel A. Skokowski, Palo Alto, is a senior at Princeton University majoring in French. She
has a deep commitment to making the arts more relevant and accessible in the modern world.
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she has a superb academic record across the humanities and a
commitment to forge strong connections between art museums and local communities,
especially to expose underprivileged children to museums and to the beauty of art. She has
curated or interned at the Morgan Library and Museum, the Princeton Art Museum and for
the Santa Fe Arts Commission, and is a Behrman Undergraduate Fellow. She is also a three
season (year-round) varsity cross country and varsity track athlete. Her career aspirations are
to push the boundaries of art curation. Rachel will do the European Enlightenment
Programme within the M.Phil. in Modern Languages at Oxford.
Sarah E. Yerima, Los Angeles, is a senior at Princeton University where she majors in Sociology. Much of her scholarly work relates to what she describes as the fallacy of post-racialism in the United States, and framed by her own and her family’s experiences, her grandparents’ in the rural south, and hers in an all-black neighborhood in Los Angeles and finally in the privilege of Princeton. Her senior thesis is on the evolution of colorblindness in American jurisprudence and the perpetuation of racial inequality. Sarah has an exceptional academic record across the social sciences at Princeton, has been active as a peer and residential college advisor and as a women’s mentor, and is a member of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows. She also studied in Brazil where she investigated racial prejudice in a different historical context.