s enior Profile: Wendell Phillips award recipient Isabelle Charles reflects on her time at tufts

by Elizabeth Zacks Deputy Features Editor

Isabelle Charles, a senior majoring in English and Africana studies, is the 2023 recipient of the Wendell Phillips Award. This annual award is given to a senior who is both an exceptional speaker and has a great sense of responsibility toward the community. As the Wendell Phillips Award winner, Charles will give a speech as part of Commencement weekend during the Baccalaureate Ceremony on May 20.

The Wendell Phillips Award was established in 1896, and the winner delivers an inspirational message to the graduating class centered around the ideas and values of civic engagement.

Charles sat down with the Daily and explained how applying for the Wendell Phillips Award was a chance to look back on her time at Tufts.

“I’d been reflecting on my senior year and my Tufts experience for so long,” Charles said. “Being a writer and trying to compartmentalize everything, I was like ‘Wow, how would I describe this whole experience, these four years?’”

During her academic career at Tufts, Charles double majored in English and Africana studies. She switched from sociology to English in her sophomore year when she realized she missed aspects of the English curriculum such as creative writing.

From the start of her college experience, Charles decided to pursue courses in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, which houses the Africana studies major. She was spurred by a love of history, her own background and her advisor — former Professor H. Adlai Murdoch, who previously taught Intro to Africana Studies.

“[Murdoch] has just been instrumental to my experience,” Charles said. “My mom is Jamaican and Panamanian, my dad is Haitian, and so that’s what struck me to go into Africana studies.”

Charles was also involved in a variety of on- and off-campus extracurricular activities throughout her time at Tufts.

She was a member and eventual co-president of the Ladies of Essence, Tufts’ only all-femme a capella group that specializes in music from the African diaspora and African tradition.

“It was a lot of work, but it was very rewarding in the end, because it’s a very talented group of individuals,” Charles added. see CHARLES, page 30

During her sophomore year, when she was at home due to the pandemic, Charles wrote for the Tufts Observer. When Charles returned to campus her junior year, she became the magazine’s poetry and prose editor.

“I joined the Observer as a staff writer, and that was really fun because I had met a lot of new people through the Observer, and I was able to write again in a way in which … was different to class writing or academic writing,” Charles commented.