Williams Senior Rachel Shalev wins prestigious Marshall Scholarship12:00AM / Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Williams College senior Rachel Gabriella Shalev was in a car when she received the call on her cell phone that she was to receive a coveted Marshall Scholarship.
The prestigious award provides recipients with the opportunity and funds for two years of graduate study in the United Kingdom.
"I have no idea what the selection committee chair said after he told me I had won. I just remember writing down a phone number. I have no clue whose number it was or what I was supposed to do with it," said Rachel. "I was surprised and extremely excited. I'm glad I wasn't the one driving."
Scholarships were awarded to 43 candidates nationwide from a pool of about 1,000 students endorsed by their respective schools.
"Rachel's strong work ethic, her ability to synthesize large amounts of complex information and to articulate informed and sophisticated arguments, as well as her passion for history and political science made her an exceptional candidate," said Guillaume Aubert, assistant professor of history at Williams.
An undergraduate history major, Rachel plans to pursue a two-year M.Phil. in modern historiography at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland as preparation for a joint J.D./Ph.D. degree. In her graduate work, she hopes to continue to explore the construction of historical narratives, the interpretation of those texts, and the politicization of their lessons.
Rachel said she has always been interested in history and, at Williams, her professors "opened my eyes to the richness lying beneath and within what I had always seen as flat historical texts."
"… a common theme runs through all my papers," she wrote in her application for the Marshall Scholarship. "While the 'who,' 'what,' 'when,' and 'where' always vary, I relish the opportunity posed by each paper to explore the questions of 'how' - how different histories have been written and re-written. In this way, I find the study of history, and especially historiography, both intellectually gratifying and socially and politically relevant. "
This year Rachel has included in her course work a one semester independent study that considers the historical dynamics of the legal discourse about separation of church and state in France and the United States, comparing the development and renegotiation of each nation's separation model during critical historical moments.
"Her work clearly expresses a rare maturity and ability to integrate diverse subjects that are complex in scope, clear in sophistication and exemplary of her shear intellectual prowess," wrote President of the College Morton Owen Schapiro in recommending her for the Marshall. Rachel was one of 16 Williams candidates endorsed by the college in September and the only one to win a scholarship.
This is not the first honor for Rachel. In the past three years at Williams, she won the Nathan Brown Book Prize in History and the Richard Ager Newhall Book Prize in European History, a Beinecke Memorial Scholarship, and election to Phi Beta Kappa at the close of her junior year.
She also has been an important leader outside of the classroom, and "is as passionately committed to public service and citizenship as she is to the life of the mind," said Professor of History Shanti Marie Singham.
"In my career, I hope to balance academics with activism," Rachel said. She looks forward to being a legal practitioner and a professor of legal history and constitutional law, a career in which she can actively advance the public good.
"The generous education I have received at Williams College has only furthered my interest in exploring questions that push the limits of representation and demand new response to changing realities," she wrote in her Marshall application. "In my own intellectual process as a student, I have developed a pattern that embodies this impulse to push the boundaries."
At Williams, Rachel is co-president of College Democrats, a writer and editor of the Williams Progressive, a mentor and tutor of high school students from disadvantaged areas for A Better Chance, a peer health counselor, and a volunteer at Images Cinema, Williamstown's art, and only, cinema.
She is the daughter of Dorothy and Moshe Shalev of Old Saybrook, Conn. She graduated from Vernon Hills High School in Vernon Hills, Ill.
The scholarships, named after former U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, were founded in 1953 in commemoration of the "humane ideals" of the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild the Allied countries after World War II. They are funded by the British government and cover university fees and living expenses for two years of study in the UK. |
