Rhiana Gunn-Wright (‘11), an African American Studies and WGSS major, is named a Rhodes scholar, among seven other Yale students awarded 2013 Rhodes Scholarships. The honors were announced in a news release by the Rhodes Trust on Saturday, November 17. Yale News reports that seven is a record number of Yale students chosen for the award in any one year.
Rhiana is no stranger to high honors, having been the recipient of the William Pickens Prize in African American Studies for her senior essay, “Breaking the Brood Mare: Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven.”
Professor Hazel Carby advised Rhiana’s senior essay. In an email on Monday, November 19, Carby expressed that Rhiana’s essay was “a brilliant and provocative work of research and social policy analysis which broke new ground in the study of black women in the multiple dimensions of their encounter with the state in its administration of systems of welfare for mothers and children.”
As one of the 32 students in the 2013 American Rhodes Class, Rhiana was chosen from a pool of 838 applicants. The Rhodes Scholarship awards two and three years of study at Oxford University to 32 American students annually.
Rhodes Scholarships, established in 1902, fulfill the bequest of Cecil Rhodes, a British philanthropist and South African colonialist who amassed his fortune in diamond mining and other industry in Africa, and for whom was named the region in African formerly known as “Rhodesia.”
Rhiana Gunn-Wright is currently the Mariam K. Chamberlain Fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC. Her interests focus on the complex causes of inequality and poverty, and she plans on a career in public policy to help ensure more opportunities for the disadvantaged. Click here to read the full story on Yale 2013 Rhodes scholars at Yale News.
Updated April 23, 2019