Penelope Lusk, a Ph.D. candidate in University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, has been awarded a 2024 Queen Elizabeth Scholarship, which covers all fees and provides a stipend of 16,000 pounds, or about $20,000, for a year of study at the University of Oxford in England.
The Queen Elizabeth Scholarship, made possible by funding from Walter Annenberg, is awarded to outstanding students of Penn and Oxford, which alternate sending one Ph.D. student to the other university as a non-degree visiting student. Applicants must be at the dissertation stage or in the final stages of coursework in pursuit of a Ph.D. in any subject taught at Oxford University. A committee of Penn faculty select the Queen Elizabeth Scholar.
Lusk, from Brooklyn, New York, is a Ph.D. candidate in education, culture, and society at Penn GSE with a graduate certificate in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. She has also completed a certificate in college and university teaching. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Bowdoin College, a master’s degree in narrative medicine from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in criticism and theory from the University of Exeter, where she was a U.S.-U.K. Fulbright study/research grantee.
Since coming to Penn, Lusk has been a volunteer with the Philadelphia chapter of the National High School Ethics Bowl, a canvasser for local voting efforts, and a member of the Penn Violence Prevention student board. She is also a post-graduate fellow in narrative medicine at Columbia. In her dissertation, “Shame and the Student Body,” Lusk examines the impact of shame as a quintessential self-conscious emotion on personal identity and community development in education and health care. Her scholarship on shame, identity, learning, and health equity in classrooms and in broader social life has been accepted for publication in a number of journals.
The Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships assisted Lusk in her application for the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship.
