Kyle Tucker, an IU Slavic Department and International Studies 2023 graduate, has been honored as a recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, offered through the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. The scholarship, founded by the British Parliament in 1953 as a living memorial to the American statesman George C. Marshall, covers the costs of graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom.
Tucker has spent fall 2023 working on nuclear security issues for the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, D.C., as a Scoville Peace Fellow. As a Marshall Scholar, Tucker plans to spend a year pursuing an MA in National Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He will follow this with a second year in the Strategic Studies MA program at the University of St. Andrews.
At IU, Tucker was heavily involved in the Slavic Department’s activities. Tucker volunteered as a teacher of Russian to elementary-aged students as part of the Bridges: Children, Languages, World program, was a 2020 inductee into the Dobro Slovo National Slavic Honor Society, and a 2021 inductee into Phi Beta Kappa, the national academic honor society for liberal arts and sciences. He was also a recipient of five Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarships and a Boren scholarship; Tucker was an inaugural member of the IU Russian Flagship Program. The capstone of his undergraduate Russian language and culture training was an academic year at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Tucker’s undergraduate senior thesis, “The Evolving Nature of Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Doctrine,” received the 2021-22 Daniel Armstrong Memorial Research Paper Award for Best Undergraduate Paper at IU Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute’s fall reception in September 2022. It also was recently published in Volume 16 of the University of California Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies.
After his MA programs in the UK funded by the Marshall Scholarship, Tucker plans to pursue a career devoted to nuclear nonproliferation and risk reduction.
The last Slavic department student to receive the prestigious Marshall Scholarship was Elizabeth Skomp in 1997. Skomp is now provost of Stetson University in Florida. Only 19 students in IU history have received this scholarship. The department congratulates Kyle Tucker on this amazing accomplishment and the many achievements in his academic career so far.
For more announcements of the great news, see:
British Government announced today the 51 winners of 2024 Marshall Scholarships.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/british-government-announces-winners-of-2024-marshall-scholarships
Winners of the 2024 Marshall Scholarship
https://www.marshallscholarship.org/scholars/2024-scholars
As prestigious Marshall Scholar, IU Bloomington alumnus will advance nuclear nonproliferation
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/33777-as-prestigious-marshall-scholar-iu-bloomington
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