Katherine Clifton was an academic and extracurricular star at both Punahou School and Princeton University.
So it should be no surprise her star will continue to shine at England’s Oxford University next year after being named one of 32 American Rhodes Scholars.
“I’m very excited,” said Clifton, who recently graduated magna cum laude from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in theater. “I’m so grateful. It is such an honor.”
At Oxford, Clifton plans to complete two master’s degree programs: Russian and Eastern European studies, and migration studies.
Clifton, 23, is home with her parents in Honolulu during a break in a Princeton fellowship that she’s serving in Belgrade, Serbia, where she is writing and staging an original documentary play exploring the tensions between the Serb and Roma people.
The play will be first performed in Serbia on April 8, which is International Romani Day, and will then go on tour around that country.
The fellowship brings Clifton full circle to the start of her Princeton education, when she lived in Serbia for nine months doing community service work before her freshman year as part of the university’s Bridge Year Program.
While in Serbia in 2010-11, Clifton taught English to children in a Roma settlement in the city of Nis. It was there she witnessed the marginalization of Romani people, a large Indo-Aryan ethnic minority in Europe with a long history of being persecuted.
Clifton, born and raised in Honolulu, recalled that her interest in the Romani people actually goes back to high school, when her Punahou history teacher taught her that the Roma suffered the highest percentage of population loss during the Holocaust.
Her interest in the performing arts goes back even further.
“I caught the theater bug at an early age,” she said, noting that she acted in a dozen shows at the Diamond Head Theatre between age 8 and 12 and was part of theater’s Shooting Stars children’s performing arts group.
During her Punahou years, Clifton was busy. Not only was she part of the school’s theater group, but was part of the speech and debate teams, was a member of the film club and performed ballet at the Punahou dance center after school.
She also volunteered with Hawaii Literacy, a nonprofit tutoring program dedicated to improving literacy rates in Hawaii. She read to people for whom English is a second language, among other things.
As a Girl Scout she created a video to explain what Hawaii Literacy does and had it translated into Samoan and Marshallese. The video earned her the Gold Award, Girl Scouts’ highest achievement, the equivalent of Eagle Scout for the Boy Scouts.
In college, Clifton was just as busy. She performed and directed with the Princeton Shakespeare Company. She tutored inmates at New Jersey correctional facilities as part of the Prison Teaching Initiative and was a member of the Bhangra Punjabi dance team.
She spent last summer in Japan as the Osawa Fellow through the Princeton in Asia program, which included one week teaching drama at a Japanese summer camp. In 2012 she represented the United States in the English Speaking Union’s International Speaking Competition.
From her sophomore year on, Clifton was elected as a representative to the Princeton student government, where she successfully campaigned for the creation of a study program between semesters.
The program, called Wintersession, gives faculty, staff and alumni a chance to offer students a short, noncredit course on any topic during the 10-day break between semesters.
Turns out Wintersession has become a robust, thriving activity with some 1,200 students enrolled at last count. The program is quickly becoming a Princeton institution.
“Hopefully, they might change the calendar for a one-month break,” she said.
Does this woman ever rest?
“It’s tough for me not to (get involved with extracurricular activities),” she said. “It’s hard to say no when there are so many opportunities at your fingertips.”
Clifton, selected from a Rhodes Scholar pool of 869 candidates nominated by their colleges and universities, will start her studies at Oxford in October.
She is the daughter of nutritionist Terry Clifton and her husband, Richard Clifton, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge.
