Yale senior Daniel Judt to study history at Oxford as Rhodes Scholar

Daniel H. Judt ’18 will study at the University of Oxford in England, as one of 32 U.S. students awarded Rhodes Scholarships.

The American cohort of 2018 Rhodes Scholars — which also includes Yale alum JaVaughn (“J.T.”) Flowers ’17 B.A. — will join an international group of students chosen from more than 64 different countries from around the world for two or three years of study at Oxford. The Rhodes Scholarships are “the oldest and best known award for international study, and arguably the most famous academic award available to American college graduates,” says Elliot F. Gerson, secretary of the Rhodes Trust. They are also competitive, with 866 applicants from 299 schools and colleges worldwide vying for this year’s awards.

Judt, who hails from Manhattan, New York, is a history major. His senior thesis is about how the Socialist movement influenced conservative policies in the American South. He aspires to be an intellectual historian “who not just interprets the world, but changes” it, according to the Rhodes Trust. He will study for an M.Phil. in history at Oxford.

He has won major Yale prizes and honors in journalism, nonfiction writing, English, and the humanities. He co-founded and is editor-in-chief of Brink, a book review journal inspired by the New York Review of Books, where he interned with the late Robert Silvers. He has written for The Nation, the Yale Politic, The New York Times, and many other publications. Judt has also taught literature, French, and English to high school students in New Haven, prison inmates, and French adult refugees in Paris.