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Weinberg alumnus headed to Beijing for graduate degree

The Office of Fellowships is excited to announce that Maximillian “Max” Rowe (WCAS ’18) has been chosen for the 2019–2020 cohort of Yenching Scholars! Next year, Max will earn a master’s degree in China studies at Yenching Academy of Peking University, in Beijing.

Max graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and with departmental honors from Northwestern in 2018, majoring in economics and comparative literature while minoring in Chinese. His undergraduate Image of Max Rowethesis focused on Shanghai’s “New Sensationalist” writers and received the American Comparative Literature Association’s Presidential Undergraduate Prize for Best Thesis. At Northwestern, Max also served as president of the Political Union and as editor for Politics and Policy. His time at the Yenching Academy will mark Max’s third trip to China: he attended Princeton in Beijing on a Northwestern Undergraduate Language Grant and later interned at an exclusively Mandarin-speaking office in Beijing. At the Yenching Academy, Max will continue his literary studies on the literature and culture track while making use of the academy’s interdisciplinary leadership training.

The Yenching Academy brings together young people who have demonstrated a talent for leadership and innovation. At Yenching, they are immersed in an intensive learning environment where they can explore China and its past, present, and future roles in the world. The academy’s goal is to shape new generations of global citizens with a nuanced understanding of China. The academy provides full fellowships to its scholars and offers them a wide array of interdisciplinary courses on China within broadly defined fields of the humanities and social sciences. Max will join approximately one hundred and twenty-five outstanding young scholars from more than forty countries.

Yenching logoMax is the fourth consecutive Wildcat to be named a Yenching Scholar. Last year, journalism major Julia Jacobs (Medill ’18) was chosen for the program. The two previous years, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences supplied graduates to the program: Allison Sherlock won the award in 2017, and Diana Chang was named Northwestern’s first Yenching Scholar in 2016.

Contact Amy Kehoe at amy.kehoe@northwestern.edu to learn more about the Yenching Scholars program.