Recently, WIAReport published a post on sixteen American women who were awarded Rhodes Scholarships. The scholarships provide funds for two or three years of graduate study at the University of Oxford in Britain. Rhodes Scholars from the United States join 48 students from 14 other jurisdictions at Oxford.
One of the non-American Rhodes Scholars this year is a senior at Harvard University. Yen Pham is the daughter of Vietnam refugees who settled in Australia. At Harvard, she is majoring in English and has served as a staff writer for the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
At Oxford, Pham will pursue a master’s degree in contemporary literature concentrating on the literature of migration and a second master’s degree in film aesthetics. “Migration has been a huge force in my life, so that’s been a governing cultural dynamic of my life,” Pham said. “It’s something I’ve always been thinking about. I’ve spent a lot of time studying literature, but I think film is an extremely important means by which we tell stories today.”