I'm currently studying for an MPhil in Economics at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship. 

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My previous work focuses on understanding how communities recover from conflict or catastrophe. In history, I focused on biographies of individuals who changed systems at critical junctures, and in economics, I researched how policies impact inequality.

Before Oxford, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and economics. For my honors thesis, I wrote an intergenerational biography of the descendants of the enslaved people whose labor contributed to Harvard's founding, advised by Sven Beckert and Emma Rothschild. Other biographies focused on international bankers in civil wars, diplomats in the Bangladesh Genocide, and convict leasing in Reconstruction-era Alabama. Outside of history, I studied monetary policy and inequality for the Federal Reserve Challenge Team and in Lawrence Summer's and Paul Tucker's research seminar, helped create digital data platforms for the U.S. Census, built macroeconomic forecasting models for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa at the IMF, and researched presidential pardons in Martha Minow's Radcliffe Research group.

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I'm from Southern California, and ever since I was young, I've loved painting and writing stories. My artwork and poems have been featured in the White House, the Kennedy Center's Hall of Nations, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. 

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Email: chencarissa@gmail.com

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