Pham Named Sixth 2016 Rhodes Scholar from Harvard

Yen H. Pham ’15-’16 has received a 2016 Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, bringing the total number of Harvard undergraduates to win the prestigious award this year to six.

Pham—an inactive Crimson editor and a second semester senior in Dudley House—applied to the Rhodes program through her home country of Australia, where she was awarded one of nine spots allotted for students from that country. The announcement, made Sunday by the Rhodes Trust, was “surreal," Pham said.

“This is obviously the outcome that I had hoped for, but I feel like I totally lack the resources to comprehend what this means,” Pham said.

An English concentrator set to graduate at the end of this semester, Pham will study the contemporary literature of migration while at Oxford. The topic of migration is particularly meaningful to Pham, she said, and is one that has “governed most of [her] life.”

“My parents were refugees to Australia,” Pham said. “That’s something that’s very important to my personal history.”

Pham became interested in studying the literature of migration after taking English professor Philip J. Fisher’s course, “The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present” and reading Willa Cather’s “My Antonia.”

“I found that there were surprising resonances between that book and my personal experience,” Pham said of Cather’s novel.

The relevance of issues surrounding migration to modern world affairs also compelled Pham to study the topic at Oxford.

“Migration is a huge political question at the moment,” Pham said. “I think what is more unusual is why you would study the literature of it and not something more empirical.”

Aside from her personal “bias” toward literature, Pham said she sees merit in understanding the “the human angle” of geopolitics, which literature in particular “does pretty much better than anything else,” she said.

Aside from studying English, Pham said she looks forward to joining the community at Oxford and possibly becoming involved in theater there. In the meantime, Pham said she will enjoy her final weeks at Harvard.