Recent U-M graduate Yumna Dagher has been named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. A double major in English and the Environment, she became the 33rd U-M Rhodes Scholar since the awards were established in 1902. She intends to pursue her MSc in both Nature, Society, and Environment and Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology.
Yumna currently works in the LSA Dean’s Office as a Dean’s Fellow, a one-year position for recent graduates interested in working in higher education. Within this role, she works widely with partners to implement sustainability and undergraduate education initiatives across LSA. She assists Professor Anne McNeil, Sustainability Advisor to the Dean, in carrying out sustainability projects. In the future, she hopes to work at the intersection of culture, cooperative economics, and sustainable food systems while developing art and writing practice as a printmaker, cartoonist, and poet.
Yumna has earned many achievements in these fields as an undergraduate. She was a Program Lead at the University of Michigan Food Program, a Refugee Education Intern at the U-M Campus Farm, a Curatorial Assistant at Noon@Night, and served as a Student Advisory Board Member at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Yumna was also named a Brehm Scholar, Graham Sustainability Scholar, Ginsberg Community Leadership Fellow, and 2025 Young Climate Leader of Color. She received the John J Kennedy Honors Graduation prize for her thesis “Building the House” and won several Hopwood Program Awards in Poetry.
In her personal time Yumna loves to read, play video games, and DJ on the radio.
She applied for the Rhodes Scholarship because she has always wanted to pursue graduate study but felt that the possibility of a fully funded graduate education was likely unattainable. At Oxford, she hopes to gain the theoretical grounding and interdisciplinary training necessary to build projects that honor the relational practices she witnessed in environmental spaces in Detroit–where stewardship becomes a vessel for building collective climate futures. In sum, graduate study will allow her to deepen her understanding and dive deeply into community-based environmental work upon returning to the United States.
She believes that if anyone has an inkling that they could apply, they should and that period of introspection will be deeply useful for clarifying one’s values and academic interests.
Yumna would like to thank her parents and sisters, Hiba and Ayah as well as her friends who supported her through the process. She would also like to thank her recommenders: Clara Gamalski, Alex Bryan, Jeremy Moghtader, and Mahalina Dimacali as well as professors Hadji Bakara, Cody Walker, Lisa Young, and Toby Millman and thesis advisor Molly Lynch.
