Leverett Senior Awarded Marshall Scholarship

Eugenia V. Levenson ’03 has won a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, planning to use the award to study social anthropology at Cambridge University.

The Leverett House senior, who is a senior editor of The Crimson, learned of the decision by phone on Sunday night.

“I am very excited and thrilled to have this opportunity to live and study in England,” she said.

Levenson joins two other Harvard seniors, Christopher R. Laumann ’03 and Sue Meng ’03, who were announced last week as recipients of the award.

Meng declined the Marshall to accept a Rhodes Scholarship for study at Oxford University.

Levenson said she was not overly discouraged at not being named last week, but she added that “it was definitely nerve-wracking to be waiting these last three weeks.”

Levenson was born in Moscow but currently makes her home in Oak Park, Ill., where she attended Oak Park and River Forest High School.

A history and literature concentrator, she says her intention to pursue a master’s of philosophy in social anthropology, with a focus on urban and ethnicity studies, will hopefully provide her with a refreshing change of subject matter.

“I’d like to think that they were impressed by my academic plan of study,” Levenson said. “I hope that they thought it was interesting and exciting and that they saw my enthusiasm for social anthropology.”

In addition to her work at The Crimson, she is an undergraduate fellow at Harvard Magazine.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she has played junior varsity field hockey and been involved with Harvard Model Congress.

Each year, 40 American college seniors receive Marshall scholarships, which allow them to study at any British university. The awards cover all academic, travel and living expenses and are valued at about $60,000 dollars each. The program has awarded more than 1,000 scholarships since its inception.

The program was endowed by the British parliament in 1953 as a symbolic show of gratitude for United States aid under the Marshall Plan, the economic rebuilding package that Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced in his Harvard Commencement address in 1947.