Joseph Beadle - 23/24 Choate Fellow to Harvard
Joe graduated with a Double Starred First Class degree in Chinese Studies from Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was an Organ Scholar. He won the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Social Impact in recognition of his educational access and musical outreach work. During his studies, Joe also worked as an au pair in Hangzhou, China and spent a year as a Taiwan-Europe Connectivity Scholar in Taipei, where he studied, volunteered for a Taiwanese NGO, lived in a Buddhist monastery, and toured as a pianist in a blues band.
Joe’s research offers diverse, human-centred perspectives on mainland China and Taiwan, challenging the pervasive narratives of conflict to which they are too often reduced. His projects span environmentalism, video-gaming and hacking, grassroots island literature, frontlines and borders, LGBTQ+ activism, relations with Africa, and community temple-building. Joe’s work on technology and religion has been published in the British Journal of Chinese Studies, and he is currently completing his book on Chinese governance, co-authored with Professor Adam Yuet Chau and Professor Jacqueline Lin.
In the US, Joe is taking classes including Chinese politics at Harvard Law School, climate action at the Harvard Centre for the Environment, digital culture at MIT, and a daily intensive Japanese course. He also works as a Teaching Fellow for an English literature course on anxiety and art. Besides classes, Joe has been salsa-dancing, singing in a gospel choir, competing with Harvard’s dragon boat team, joining various volunteering projects, and travelling widely.
Florence Coumbe - 23/24 Choate Fellow to Harvard
Florence graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2023 with a Double First Class with Distinction in Middle Eastern Studies, specialising in Arabic and Persian.
As part of her studies, Florence lived in Amman for a year where she worked for a non-partisan think tank on national policy initiatives addressing sexual and gender-based violence and empowering women and youth to participate in Jordanian party politics. On returning to the UK, Florence has worked as a volunteer with organisations supporting refugee and asylum-seeking communities, communicating in a variety of Arabic dialects, Farsi, and Dari.
At Harvard, Florence intends to focus on the politics of the contemporary Middle East through classes at the School of Government and Kennedy School, and study groups with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center. She is also using this opportunity to take an intensive Russian language course and classes on Central Asian politics. She hopes to use her language skills in her current research into the developing relations between Arab States of the Gulf and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.
Outside of the classroom, Florence is enjoying learning to figure skate with the Harvard Figure Skating Club.
Ezra Sharpe - 23/24 Henry Fellow to Harvard
Ezra graduated from Oxford in June 2023 with a Double First Class in Geography, where he attended specific focus to the theory of war, biopolitics, and geopolitics.
During his time at Harvard, Ezra aims to cross-fertilize the fields of international relations and intellectual history in order to understand how the concept of ‘peace’ can be conceptualised in the 21st century. In particular, he is interested in thinking about the different actors which shape peace processes across different scales, such as institutions, businesses, ethnic groups, and religious communities.
Whilst at Oxford, Ezra was a global affairs and opinions editor at The Oxford Blue, as well as the events officer for the Oxford Diplomatic Society, where he helped organise visits to the Pakistan High Commission and the Russian Embassy in London. He was also captain of the cuppers-winning Brasenose football team.
Outside of Oxford, he has spent time volunteering for a Jewish Youth organisation which aims to facilitate constructive discussions on peace processes for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Additionally, Ezra has also completed some pro-bono environmental consultancy work.
After completing his study at Harvard, he hopes to mobilise his interest in peace within the fields of diplomacy and multilateralism.
Jonathan Yap - 23/24 Henry Fellow to Harvard
Jonathan graduated from the University of Cambridge in June 2023 with a Double First Class in Human, Social and Political Sciences – specializing in Politics and Social Anthropology.
At Harvard, Jonathan is keen to deepen his research interests in political philosophy and social anthropology, while cross attending classes with Harvard Law School. In particular, he is interested in better apprehending inequality in Singapore, re-situating, and re-thinking meritocracy as state ideology, thereby provoking constructive dialogue on issues such as Singapore’s welfare schemes and education system. He is presently a Teaching Fellow under Professor Michael Sandel, teaching a class on “Meritocracy and its Critics”.
Previously, Jonathan had brief stints in Consulting, Asset Management, and the Military. Most recently, he was a Summer Associate at the Boston Consulting Group, where he played a role researching and drafting a paper on sustainable trade, which was published on the SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar 2022. In his 2nd semester, he hopes to be able to cross attend classes at Harvard Business School, focusing on sustainable finance and profit-with-purpose investing.
In a past life, Jonathan was an active debater, winning the World Schools debating Championships with Singapore; and subsequently serving as a Signals Officer (lieutenant) in the Singapore Armed Forces.
Nyasha Mukonoweshuro- 23/24 Henry Fellow to Yale
Nyasha this year graduated from Loughborough University with first class honours in History and Politics. Her undergraduate research explored the value of narratives in reconciliation following violent conflict in post-colonial contexts, for which she won her department's dissertation prize. She is interested in studying African epistemic agency in approaches towards transitional justice, focusing especially on the role of typically marginalized actors such as women and young people. Stemming from her experiences as a former swimmer, she is also passionate about supporting marginalized communities and creating equitable environments. As an undergraduate student, she received the Vice Chancellor’s Gold award for her efforts to strengthen the university’s racial equity strategy, alongside her extracurricular contributions in various roles she held such as School President for her department. At Yale, she is currently taking classes in Yale’s Department of Political Science and Yale Law School. As a current Rhodes Scholar Elect, Nyasha will begin her graduate studies at Oxford next year. She hopes to pursue a career in the legal sector, particularly at the intersection of human rights and international law. In her spare time, Nyasha competes as part of the Yale University Women's Water-polo team and also enjoys running and baking.
Lewis Roberts - 23/24 Procter Fellow to Princeton
Lewis graduated with a First Class BA and MSt with Distinction in English from Magdalen College, Oxford, where they were a Demy of the college. In 2021, they began a PhD on poetic form in nineteenth-century poetry at St John’s College, Cambridge, funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. They are also a Cambridge Trust Scholar. Lewis has previously directed the Cambridge Footlights, and led the Governing Board of a school in Oxford, where they held specific responsibilities for Safeguarding, and children for whom English is an additional language. They are now an active political campaigner on these issues.
Lewis’s PhD thesis is a study of the poetic line-ending in poetry from around 1770 to 1930, and aims to show how a constellation of different methods – including historical poetics, philosophical enquiry, manuscript studies, and close reading – can be brought to bear on poetry. Their thesis provides a cross-section for some of the biggest questions in the study of poetry and of aesthetics generally, such as how literary texts create meaning, and what might be the character of the type of meaning that literature can obtain. In asking these questions, Lewis’s work seeks to build a reparative relationship between texts of “Practical Criticism” and the theoretical side of the subject, including Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory. All their work is in some way concerned with questions of what a literary text is, and what the value of literary texts might be both aesthetically and ethically. Lewis’s research therefore sees the minutiae of poetic form as at the centre of something like a spider’s web, which, when touched, makes everything connected to it shimmer.
Lewis has published or lectured on a wide range of topics in this vein: the impact of Jewish thought on the works of Simeon Solomon, Coleridge and Hopkins’s dealings with Neo-Platonism, Keats and the “Egotistical sublime”, Christina Rossetti’s work as a literary historian, and T.S. Eliot’s use of French. They are currently editing a special issue of a journal on the concept of literary influence. While holding the Procter Fellowship at Princeton, Lewis will be working on various projects concerned with the philosophical standing of literary texts, and the intersection of this work with historical poetics. These projects centre on the ways in which philosophies of poetry feed into or grow out of the historical place of poetry in schools, in scholarship, and in religion. They are collaborating with the Centre for Digital Humanities at Princeton on a project to analyse poetic form by way of computer programming. They are also studying epistemology and aesthetics, and learning Hebrew, with a view to a future project on nineteenth-century Jewish literature.