Sam Bowden ’24
Kenyon graduate Sam Bowden has been awarded a coveted 2026 Marshall Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom.
A member of the Class of 2024 from Cincinnati, Bowden aims to use the distinguished award — given to 43 scholars this year — to study Eastern European history and languages, focusing on the connections between literature, language and politics in the post-Soviet region.
“I feel there’s not enough attention paid to the humanistic and cultural aspects of a lot of the things underlying the politics of Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” Bowden said. “What is very exciting to me about the Marshall is it gives me the chance to basically develop an interdisciplinary framework to understand these things.”
Since 1953, Marshall Scholarships have brought more than 2,000 young Americans to study at universities in the United Kingdom. An expression of the nation’s gratitude for economic assistance through the Marshall Plan after World War II, they finance young Americans with high ability to study for a degree in the U.K. Scholars are selected each year based on the criteria of academic merit, leadership potential and ambassadorial potential.
The scholarship represents the latest in a string of impressive accomplishments for Bowden, a valedictorian at Kenyon who has long been interested in understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine through various disciplines.
As an undergraduate who majored in English and Russian, his honors thesis for English investigated the relationship between English translations of Russian literature and geopolitical conflict between the English- and Russian-speaking worlds in light of the war in Ukraine.
After leaving Gambier, he spent a summer studying Russian in the nation of Georgia as part of the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship Program. Then he joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., as a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow, contributing research to senior scholars in its Russia and Eurasia program. He’s continued with similar work more recently in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.
After spending the past year analyzing the politics underlying Russia’s war in Ukraine — often required at lightning speed — Bowden is excited to shift gears back to the cultural aspects impacting it.
Bowden plans to complete two one-year master’s programs and will apply to study history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and modern languages at the University of Exeter in England.
Proficient in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Georgian, Bowden previously spent a summer volunteering at a refugee shelter on the Poland-Ukraine border and currently volunteers remotely as an English tutor for Ukrainian students.
His wide-ranging interests led to a variety of extracurricular activities while he was at Kenyon. Among other things, he was a Kenyon Review associate, president of the Neuroscience Club, and a co-leader of the student science and arts magazine Lyceum. He also played cello with the Kenyon Bach Society and served as a Hoskins Frame Summer Science Writing Scholar.
Jamie McGavran, associate professor of Russian, said he’s long been impressed with Bowden’s abilities.
“Sam is one of the most intellectually capable and engaged students I have encountered in 15 years of teaching at the university level,” he said. “After a year honing his research skills on the region …, he is uniquely positioned to investigate the connections between classical Russian literature and the political narratives of Russian imperialism and Putin’s brand of fascism. I’m extraordinarily proud of Sam.”
Piers Brown, associate professor of English, serves as the College’s Marshall Scholarship liaison and was Bowden’s honors thesis supervisor during his senior year. He called Bowden an exceptional student who applied his talents both to his studies and broader campus life.
“This breadth of these interests and his own intellectual curiosity is what has enabled him to transition from literary and language study to policy work with the Carnegie Institute and the Council for Foreign Relations and now back to academia with the Marshall.”