Catherine Reidy, a University of Notre Dame senior majoring in psychology with a minor in anthropology, has been awarded a Clarendon Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford.
Reidy, a Rhodes Scholar finalist, will use the scholarship to study for her master’s degree in African Studies starting in October.
The highly selective scholarship awards full tuition, fees and a stipend to students studying at Oxford. These scholarships are awarded on the basis of academic excellence and potential across all subjects at graduate level at Oxford. In 2012-13, more than 300 Clarendon scholars from more than 50 different countries are attending Oxford.
Since her freshman year at Notre Dame, Reidy has focused her academic work on international research. In the spring of her first year, she was awarded a Kellogg Institute for International Studies internship in India. She was accepted into the Kellogg International Scholars Program, which allowed her to begin undergraduate research as a sophomore.
At the end of her sophomore year, Reidy received a Kellogg Experiencing the World Fellowship and spent the summer in Makeni, Sierra Leone, where she began a research project studying politics and youth in Makeni. She returned to Sierra Leone in her junior year after winning a Kellogg/Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies research grant to study the effects of violence and civil war on the future orientations and goals of the youth. Reidy also studied in Dublin during her junior year in fall 2011.
Reidy became involved in a psychology lab in her senior year that centers on ethnic tensions between Croatian and Serbian children in integrated schools in post-conflict Croatia. She traveled to Croatia in the spring of her senior year to conduct research for her senior thesis, which focuses on this issue.
An officer in the International Development Research Council during her first three years on campus, Reidy is currently the student coordinator of the Kellogg Institute’s Africa Working Group. She is research assistant to Catherine Bolten, assistant professor of anthropology and peace Studies, through Kellogg’s International Scholars Program.
Reidy’s Clarendon Scholarship was made possible in part through her participation in Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE). CUSE provides undergraduate students in all the University’s colleges opportunities for research, scholarship, and creative projects. The center also assists them in finding faculty mentors, funding and venues for the publication or presentation of their work, and promotes applications to national Fellowship programs and prepares them in their application process.
More information on CUSE is available online at cuse.nd.edu.