Zoe,
en
transit.

Right now I'm on Cape Cod with a stack of books and a public library card— the trip begins in Paris on September 19th.

In 2,088,000 seconds, you could listen to every Beatles song 7 times, swim across the English channel 41 times, or run 129 marathons. I have spent that time on airplanes. After being born in Kampala, Uganda, my childhood became a blur of countries: Germany, Spain, and many more. Growing up constantly between countries instilled in me a deep appreciation for cultural exploration. Coming to Exeter allowed me to refine this instinct intellectually, particularly through my study of French and Francophone culture. It is through that lens that my academic interests have flourished.

Over the past four years, I have become absolutely absorbed by the study of French history and culture. By studying these subjects alongside a history of France's colonialism, I have found profound intellectual intersections between different regions of French thought. Yet, despite my deep appreciation for these academic pursuits, I yearn for learning rooted in lived experience. I am utterly excited to step out of a classroom and to learn through observation with the Perrin Fellowship.

I am eager to embody Perrin's sentiment of making the world my classroom.

This fellowship is an opportunity for a Phillips Exeter alumnus to pursue a year of independent thought, projects, and travel with the support of the academy. The Perrin Fellowship excites me enormously: it's a chance to design my own course of study, unrestricted by an external curriculum or graduation requirements. See more information about the fellowship.

I hope to use this opportunity to build a comparative understanding of French colonialism and its enduring cultural and linguistic legacies across different regions. My goal is to study how different forms of French imperial control (such as direct versus indirect) shaped political institutions, social hierarchies, and language use in formerly colonized societies. I am particularly interested in the ways colonial governance and education structured both personal and national identity, as well as its impact today. By examining the relationship between French, local languages and the development of Creole, I aspire to understand how linguistics and cultural hierarchies intersect. Over the course of this project, I hope to develop fluency in French to be able to recognize dialectic, grammatical, and vocabulary evolutions myself.

These different yet intertwined angles of exploration will allow me to question dominant historical narratives and even produce opinions of my own. I hope to contribute to scholarship on French postcolonial studies, with the aim of working alongside esteemed professionals in this field of thought, and eventually publishing my research in a formal manner.