The Rhodes Scholarship, created in 1902, is one of the most prestigious awards for international study. The scholarship awards students who embody "academic achievement, integrity of character, a spirit of unselfishness and leadership potential" with two or three years of study at the University of Oxford.

Thamara V. Jean, Brooklyn, is a senior at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she is Hunter’s first Rhodes Scholar. She majors in Political Science and Media Analysis and Criticism. She completed her senior thesis in her junior year on the Black Lives Matter movement which was subsequently published in The Journal of Politics and Society. She followed this with research in the Harvard African-American Studies Department on black nationalism in the 1960s. Thamara is especially interested in the dialectic between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism and how that shapes African-American political thought. Her interest as a social activist is to change destructive societal narratives and philosophical traditions that bring about barriers rather than common understanding. She has worked at Democracy Works and Generation Citizen, and was a producer at the CUNY Film Festival. Thamara will do the M.Phil. in Political Theory at Oxford.