Recent alumnus Nils Peterson has been awarded a 2024 Marshall Scholarship. This prestigious honor gives high-achieving young Americans the opportunity to study at the graduate level at any university in the United Kingdom. Nils will be pursuing a master’s degree in Taiwan Studies at The School of Oriental and African Studies and a master’s degree in Politics & Contemporary History at King’s College London.
Nils graduated from UW-Madison in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in History and a bachelor’s degree in Chinese, with honors in History. While at UW–Madison, Nils interned with the London-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and won 14 awards in recognition of his research and language study, including two Foreign Language Area Studies awards to study Chinese. He was also deputy-editor-in-chief of the undergraduate journal Wisconsin International Review and policy chair for the UW–Madison chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society, which won the Chapter of the Year Award in 2021.
He also completed a senior thesis in History and served as President of the Lambda Xi chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (the honor society for students of History). Post-graduation, Nils has continued volunteering with UW–Madison’s Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project, which conducts year-round research and annual field excavations to recover, identify and repatriate MIA U.S. service members.
Nils currently works for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., where he leads a team producing the China-Taiwan Weekly Update, an online open-source publication analyzing cross-Taiwan Strait developments.
After completing his master’s degree programs, Nils plans to pursue a career in national security or the government advisory sphere, guiding U.S. East Asian policy.
“I am confident that Nils will become an influential figure in foreign policy circles,” says UW–Madison History Professor Joe Dennis. “I know of no one more deserving of ongoing support at the highest level.”