Updated: Barrett ’14, Skokowski ’15, Yerima ’15 named Rhodes Scholars

Joseph Barrett ’14, Rachel Skokowski ’15 and Sarah Yerima ’15 have been selected as recipients of the U.S. Rhodes Scholarship, the organization announced on Sunday.

The Rhodes Scholarships are awarded to 32 recipients from the U.S. and over 100 students worldwide including the U.S. They provide students the opportunity to study at the University of Oxford.

Barrett, of Port Washington, N.Y., concentrated in history with a certificate in South Asian studies andgraduated summa cum laude last June. He was the recipient of a Senior Thesis Prize for his work on American history and was awarded the2014 Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize. The Pyne Prize is the University’s highest general distinction for an undergraduate student.

Barrett went on the University’s Bridge Year Program before his freshman year and studied in Varanasi, India. He also worked with the Millennium Challenge Corporation and was exposed to governmental agencies and policies.

“It has made me very aware of the importance of engaging with other cultures in meaningful ways,” he said. “There are policy-level governmental structures that we have in the U.S. which we assume are good just because we don’t have an understanding of the ways which other countries [handle them].”

Barrett co-founded Students for Prison and Education Reform in 2012, which addresses inequities within the prison system and educates inmates andhas since expanded to other college campuses. He said that his interests in prison reform were sparked by his participation in the Petey Greene Program, which is a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate incarcerated individuals.

He currently works as a regional field manager with the Petey Greene Program to expand the program and reform criminal justice.

“I certainly have an interest in doing policy work in the future, whatever governmental capacity that would be, but at the same time, I don’t feel that people who do policy work should be distant from direct service work and [its] deep challenges,” he said.

Barrett studied abroad at Oxford for a semester, but said that he believes that returning as a Rhodes Scholar will allow him to gain more insights into the differences between criminal justice systems in the U.S. and the U.K.

He said that he plans to attain a Master of Philosophy in Economic and Social History at Oxford, adding that he hopes to involve history in policymaking and to expand his work with criminal justice.

Skokowski is a senior concentrating in French from Palo Alto, Calif.Her senior thesis elaborates on the relationship between private and public collections of art, as well as the different audiences reached.

She said that she has focused on creating connections between the community and art museums and has interned at or curated museums including the Princeton University Art Museum, Morgan Library & Museum and the Santa Fe Arts Commission.

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“I’ve always been interested in art museums ever since I was a kid,” she said. “When I was ten, I organized my birthday party as a scavenger hunt for all my friends in an art museum.”

Skokowski is a Behrman Undergraduate Fellow, a selective society that discusses humanistic topics. She also became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest honor society for the liberal arts and sciences that selects members on merit, in her junior year.

She runs varsity cross country and track year-round and noted that sports allowed her to take a break from academics and helped with time management and teamwork.

Skokowski hopes to attain a Master of Philosophy in modern languages at Oxford, specifically pursuing the European enlightenment program in the French department, which involves a mixture of literature, philosophy and art.

“I’m really interested in this program because it provides an interdisciplinary approach, which has been one of my favorite things about being in the French department at Princeton,” she said.

She said that she will be able to work in the renowned Wallace Collection in London and added that she hopes to become a curator and possibly the head of the Wallace Collection.

Yerima is a senior in the sociology department and is a Behrman Undergraduate Fellow from Los Angeles.

She is a residential college advisor and apeer academic adviser for Rockefeller College and is involved in Princeton’s Women Mentorship Program.

“During my time at Princeton, I found that I’ve been most interested in classes that discuss the ways in which race, gender, class, sexual identity and all of these different identities influence our lives, social locations and the ways that we experience our world,” she said.

When working on her junior paper on hair and women of color, Yerima looked at racial pressures that are placed on women of color to wear their hair a certain way in order to conform. She is expanding on this by tracing the origins of color blindness, racial inequities and American jurisprudence in her senior thesis.

Yerima said that despite improvements in race relations, inequities never disappeared. She said that she understands the importance of racial identity through her background as a resident in an all-black neighborhood in Los Angeles and the Jim Crow experiences of her grandparents.

Yerima studied abroad in Brazil, which she said allowed her to see racialization in each country from a historical view. She said that both countries have roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade but different responses to race today.

“Stepping back and being in Brazil, and thinking about historical contingency and how that affects the ways we view identity, helped me not only put the U.S. in a global context, but better understand how particular elements have formed and shaped American society,” she said.

Yerima said that she wants to study in the Master of Philosophy program for comparative government at Oxford, which she said would offer another perspective on racial disparity.

“Comparing racial profiling and incarceration in the U.S. and the U.K. through a politics program at Oxford will be a really enriching experience for me,” she added.

She hopes to attain a J.D./Ph.D. in Law in order to be able to teach as a law professor.