Earlier this month, a WIAReport post noted that 17 of this year’s 32 Rhodes Scholars from the United States are women. Women were first allowed to participate in the Rhodes Scholarship program in 1976. This is only the fifth time since 1976 that women have made up a majority of the Rhodes Scholars from the United States.
In addition to these 17 American women who will begin studying at Oxford University in the fall are at least two other women among the 95 Rhodes Scholars worldwide who have ties to educational institutions in the United States.
Lillian Dube is one of two Rhodes Scholars from Zimbabwe. She is a 2015 graduate of the University of Chicago. She will pursue two master’s degrees at Oxford — one in education and the other in English. At the University of Chicago, Dube studied English literature, winning the Elsie F. Filippi Memorial Prize in Poetry for her thesis on violence and gender in the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. She is currently teaching high school in Hong Kong. Dube would eventually like to pursue doctoral studies in education, enabling her to one day teach literature, education and writing at the university level.
Diala Issam Al Masri is a 2015 master’s degree graduate of the Center for Development Economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is one of the three Rhodes Scholars from the region that includes Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. This is the first year that Rhodes Scholarships have been awarded to students from this region. Masri came to Williams College as a Fulbright Scholar after earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and international affairs with a minor in economics at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. After earning her master’s degree, she has stayed on at Williams as a research assistant for two economics professors.