A Worcester College alumnus and a Princeton University senior have been named as this year’s recipients of the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship.

Jack Nunn

Jack Nunn (2017, Modern Languages) is currently pursuing his DPhil in French at Exeter College. He’ll spend the next academic year as a Sachs Visiting Scholar in Princeton’s Department of History, where he will combine his academic research on medieval literature with his longstanding commitment to improve access to higher education. Jack’s project, titled ‘Inclusive Pedagogies: Re-Imagining Educational Outreach with Medieval Francophone Manuscripts’, will use medieval manuscripts as teaching tools to support greater participation in the arts and humanities. Alongside his outreach projects, Jack will continue his work on premodern poetry anthologies and spend time working with Princeton University Library’s Special Collections, particularly its treasure trove of medieval Francophone manuscripts.

Professor Kate Tunstall, Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones Fellow in Modern Languages & Tutor in French, said ‘Jack is a truly outstanding student who won pretty much every prize available at Oxford and a national prize as well.’ She said spending the year at Princeton will be a tremendous opportunity: ‘It will not only allow him to keep in touch with what he loves, namely hanging out with medieval manuscripts – I see he has already identified the library shelf-marks! – but also enable him to develop ways of engaging a wider community and persuading them that … medieval manuscripts — and higher education more generally — are for everyone.’

Educated at state comprehensive schools in Barnsley and Rotherham, Jack won the University’s Gibbs Prize for best overall performance in finals and was awarded the Ogilvie Thompson Graduate Scholarship for his Master’s. He now teaches undergraduate seminars on medieval poetry, the environmental humanities and literary theory alongside his DPhil and is graduate outreach lead for Exeter College and a languages ambassador for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

Alice McGuinness

Travelling the opposite way across the Atlantic, Alice McGuinness, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will join Worcester as our Sachs Scholar. She plans to earn two Master’s degrees while at Oxford, one in modern South Asian studies and one in forced migration and refugee studies. A history major at Princeton, Alice ultimately hopes to attend law school and work in international migration law. She speaks Hindi, Urdu, Bangla and Spanish, and uses her language skills to support migrants and refugees through various projects and non-profit work. Alice’s senior thesis examines the incarceration of women and children in colonial Bengal, India. She received the Princeton Department of History’s Lawrence Stone & Shelby Cullom Davis Prize to support her thesis research, for which she traveled last summer to the British Library to study materials on the experiences of women and children in Indian colonial jails.

Alice’s senior thesis adviser, Associate Professor of History Divya Cherian, said: ‘Alice’s record shows that for her, fulfillment lies not just in professional or academic success but in applying her academic potential towards making the world a better place. She truly represents and will work for Princeton’s best interests, which to my mind are inseparable from the best interests of society and humanity.’

The Sachs Scholarship

The Sachs Scholarship is intended to broaden the global experience of its recipients by providing them with the opportunity to study, work or travel abroad after graduation. It was established by classmates and friends of Daniel Sachs, a distinguished Princeton student athlete in the Class of 1960 who attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Sachs died of cancer at age 28 in 1967. The award is given to those who best exemplify Sachs’ character, intelligence and commitment, and whose scholarship is most likely to benefit the public.

Image credits: Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy and Nathan Stazicker

Read more about the Sachs Scholarship