Fil-Am Harvard student to study in Oxford as recipient of American Rhodes Scholarship

A Filipino-American student from Harvard University is among the recipients of the prestigious American Rhodes Scholarship for 2024.

According to The Harvard Gazette, Oakland native Eleanor M. Wikstrom is one of the nine Harvard College students who will enroll at University of Oxford in the United Kingdom next year.

Wikstrom led the efforts to get the Filipino language offered as a course at Harvard. She wrote an opinion piece at The Harvard Crimson which criticized the lack of a Tagalog language course at Harvard.

Earlier this year, the university welcomed its first Filipino language instructor, Lady Aileen Orsal, a former faculty member of Cavite State University.

At Oxford, Wikstrom will study imperial and global history as well as United States history. Her research interests include the 20th-century US system of English-only education in the Philippines as a form of "epistemic colonialism."

Wikstrom is also co-president of the Harvard Philippine Forum.

The Rhodes Scholarship is created in 1902 and covers expenses for studies of two or three years in Oxford. 

A total of 32 students, including 20 women, represent 20 colleges in the Rhodes scholarship. Harvard’s Rhodes Scholars now number 394.

—MGP, GMA Integrated News