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Four for the
Rhodes
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| Off to Oxford:
graduate student Campbell |
| photo:Les
Todd |
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Four Duke students--three seniors and one
graduate student--have been chosen this year as Rhodes Scholars.
With more students picked this year than any other school in the
country except Harvard, Duke's total number of Rhodes recipients
has reached thirty-four.
Undergraduates Alexis Blane, Pavan Cheruvu, and Samuel Malone were
selected from 925 applicants at 319 colleges and universities throughout
the country. Graduate student Christian Campbell, a native of the
Bahamas, was selected through a similar process for Caribbean residents.
Campbell, twenty-two, is a published poet in his third year of
work on his doctorate at Duke. He says he will use his time at Oxford
to get a M.Phil. degree: "I see this as a bridge to completing
my dissertation work here in British modern literature and Caribbean
literature. I thought Oxford was the ideal place to do that."
As a Caribbean poet and literary scholar, Campbell is working in
a tradition that has exploded in the past two decades with some
of the world's most prominent and celebrated authors writing in
a number of different languages. Poets such as Nobel laureate Derek
Walcott have explored the oral traditions of poetry while, at the
same time, creating a work that intends to tell Caribbean history
and construct an identity for the region.
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| Undergraduates,
above, from left to right, Cheruvu, a triple major in
biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemistry;
Blane, an English major; and Malone, a mathematics and
economics major |
| photo:Les
Todd |
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"Walcott is a major influence in my life, one of the main
reasons why I decided to pursue graduate study in order to be a
poet," says Campbell. "It's his interest in exploring
a relationship to poetry's traditions and finding a creative inheritance
for the Caribbean. That's a great tradition to work from, but I'm
also interested in moving beyond that in a more experimental mode.
"That's one of the reasons why I'm excited about going to
Oxford. At first I thought that Oxford would be too conservative
for what I want to do. And it is conservative. But I realized its
traditions could help me. The kinds of people it attracts are exciting,
and I will have opportunities to travel and learn from other places
that are important to me."
Blane, Cheruvu, and Malone, all A.B. Duke Scholars, were named
recipients of the Faculty Scholar Award, given by the Duke Academic
Council in honor of general academic excellence. All were involved
with student publications.
Blane, of Charlotte, North Carolina, majors in English and biology.
She helped start The Duke Mind, an undergraduate journal in the
cognitive sciences, and is interested in fields as diverse as neurosciences
and poetry. She is writing her senior thesis on novelist E.L. Doctorow
and poet Adrienne Rich. She is involved in karate, has been president
of the Volleyball Club, and is a member of the Undergraduate Judicial
Board. One summer, she did Alzheimer's research on a Howard Hughes
research fellowship; another summer she did relief work in Kosovo.
Blane plans to pursue a M.Phil. in English studies at Oxford.
Cheruvu, of Tampa, Florida, is a triple major in biomedical engineering,
electrical engineering, and chemistry, with a 4.0 grade point average.
He has been involved in research on artificial hearts and has helped
develop a software model for a cardiac device. He spent a summer
in southern India, where he worked in a community hospital as the
organizer of a prevention campaign concerning sexually transmitted
diseases. He is senior editor of the campus magazine Eruditio, a
publication for undergraduate writing; president of the North Carolina
chapter of an engineering honor society; and a former officer in
Spectrum, the undergraduate organization that promotes diversity
and cultural understanding on campus. He is also the organizer of
the Duke cricket team, and has served as a patient advocate in the
neurosurgery ward of Duke Hospital. Cheruvu plans to do graduate
work in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
Malone, from Zebulon, North Carolina, majors in mathematics and
economics. At Duke, he edited Vertices, an undergraduate journal
of science and technology, and recently won first place in an international
Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), his third award in MCM competition.
He's been involved in the publication of six scholarly papers; has
won the Goldwater Scholarship, a national science award; and is
active in karate and distance running. Malone plans to pursue an
M.Phil. in economics through the Oxford Financial Research Centre.
Rhodes Scholarship winners are selected on the basis of high academic
achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential, and physical
vigor, among other attributes.
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