By Donald Gilpin

Sam Harshbarger

Sam Harshbarger, a Princeton University senior who grew up in Cranbury and graduated from Princeton High School (PHS), has won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford next year. He is one of 32 Americans to receive the scholarship and the only Princeton University recipient this year.

Fluent in Spanish and Turkish, with advanced proficiency in Azerbaijani and Russian, Harshbarger is a history major at Princeton with three minors — in history and diplomacy; Near Eastern studies; and Russian, East European and Eurasian studies.

He described some of the early influences — from his parents, his childhood in Cranbury, and PHS — that helped to launch him on his ambitious explorations into the history of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

“For Christmas one year, my parents gave me Martin Sixsmith’s Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East,” Harshbarger wrote in an email. ”Inspired by this, in 2015, while I was in eighth grade at Cranbury School, I won the AFS: Project Change essay contest, writing about documenting the culture and history of Indigenous people in Russia. AFS sent me to Izhevsk, Udmurtia in Russia to document and share with Americans the richness of Indigenous Udmurt culture.”

At about the same time, Harshbarger began studying the Russian language with one of his neighbors who had been born in Russia and was the mother of one of his classmates. Harshbarger’s parents both work in business, but they encouraged his studies in history. His father brought Sam and his brother to Central America during summer breaks to stay with host families and study Spanish.

“Through this and the experiences my mom recounted as a young adult living in France and Japan, I was inspired to venture somewhere new and unfamiliar and try to learn something,” Harshbarger wrote.

Two of his former teachers recalled Harshbarger and his accomplishments at PHS. “He came to class every day excited about what we were doing,” said PHS history teacher Rick Miller, whom Harshbarger described as “the teacher who made me most excited to study history.”

Miller noted, “He loved to talk history. It was never about a grade or about just meeting some requirement for an assignment. He always wanted to know and learn and discuss — an amazing person to work with.”

During his years at PHS Harshbarger took two classes with Miller, as well as pursuing several independent study projects, including one on Russo-American relations under President Woodrow Wilson and another on the impact of the Cold War on various European countries.

“His level of primary resource research was really advanced,” Miller added. “I remember thinking he could be working in many schools’ graduate programs even as a PHS senior. You could tell he had that passion.”

Miller related that Harshbarger started a club called the PHS Forum, inviting professors from Princeton University to come speak to students at PHS. “We had a former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, a former state department official, and a communications director for a national political campaign. He reached out to people and because of his passion they were willing to come in and share what they do with PHS students. Because of his excitement he helped others learn and get excited about it too. He has the ability to connect with others and share his excitement.”

PHS English teacher Doug Levandowski taught Harshbarger in an AP English class and was also the faculty adviser overseeing Harshbarger’s work on The Tower school newspaper. “I owe any writing skills I have to him,” said Harshbarger.

Levandowski noted that Harshbarger was one of the youngest section editors when he took over the Opinions section during his sophomore year. “His ability to work with new writers was exemplary, as, of course, was his writing,” Levandowski wrote in an email. “He was unafraid to critique the school, and even when he received administrative pushback, he held his ground.”

In English class Harshbarger was “always interested in looking deeper into topics,” Levandowski recalled, “but the main way that I remember Sam is for his passionate engagement in our class discussions. He never talked over his fellow students, and he always left space for others to participate, but he was always, always ready to talk in depth about his readings and excited to hear what others had to say.”

Harshbarger described his years at PHS as “immensely formative,” as he engaged with Euro-area economic policy and issues in the broader global economy as a member of the PHS EuroChallenge team, and he became interested in journalism and writing as a career when joined the The Tower student newspaper. For five weeks during the summer of 2017, between sophomore and junior years, Harshbarger studied Russian in Moscow through the State Department’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth.

He became interested in Turkey because of its link to the former Soviet Union across the Black Sea and to the Middle East to its south. He took a gap year after PHS before enrolling at Princeton University during which he was a policy fellow with the Washington D.C.-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), working part of that time in Turkey with SETF’s humanitarian assistance to northwestern Syria.

When Harshbarger started at Princeton University in the fall of 2020, classes were all remote because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So he decided to head to Istanbul, where he took Turkish language group classes in the morning, continued his work with SETF as director for congressional strategy, and, because of the time difference, pursued his Princeton classes and coursework in the evening and early morning, a Princeton University press release reported.

He returned to the Princeton University campus in the spring of 2021 to continue his course work, but went back to Istanbul every summer and winter break to continue his research in the region. He is currently working on his senior thesis, tentatively titled “Between Cold War and Decolonization: Turkey and Post-Colonial Afro-Asia, 1951-1960,” which analyzes Turkey’s participation in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and its relationship with North African anti-colonial nationalists, according to the press release.

Harshbarger is a member of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, a group of juniors and seniors focused on humanistic inquiry; a student fellow of the Center for International Security Studies; and an undergraduate fellow of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is the recipient of the Lawrence Stone and Shelby Cullom Davis Thesis Prize Fellowship. He is an international policy associate with Princeton’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and in September 2022 he received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence.

In addition to his studies at Princeton, Harshbarger is a research assistant at work on Turkish foreign policy with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and he has also served as an international affairs research analyst with Bechtel, an international construction and engineering firm; as a research assistant with New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C.; and the Evergreen Strategy Group, which specializes in corporate activism.

After graduation from Princeton, Harshbarger will pursue a Master of Philosophy in history at Oxford starting in October 2024. Following his two years at Oxford he plans to return to Istanbul, he said, “where I hope to research and write on the nexus of conflict, economic power, and historical memory across Eurasia and the Middle East.”

“Sam is a once-in-a-generation academic talent,” said Natasha Wheatley, Princeton assistant history professor who has taught Harshbarger and advised him on his thesis. “His exceptional academic work is fueled by a boundless curiosity, an expansive humanist ethos, and deep moral engagement in the contemporary world.”

She continued, as quoted in the University’s press release, “His multilingualism corresponds to a profoundly cosmopolitan outlook: to a highly unusual degree, Sam can truly see the world from many different perspectives.”