Kashish Bastola
Kashish Bastola
A Harvard senior from McKinney, Texas, Kashish Bastola studies histories of the U.S. Gulf South and the Himalaya. His senior thesis unravels a little-known CIA operation in the 1960s that trained Tibetan refugees on U.S. campuses and abandoned military bases. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he was awarded Harvard’s Paton Prize in the Humanities, recognizing the senior showing greatest promise in the humanities or fine arts.
A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and Mississippi Delta Scholar, Kashish has worked on oral history and curatorial projects with the Harvard Forest, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the National Park Service, and the South Asian American Digital Archive. He has served as an intern at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the Supreme Court of Nepal. Kashish cherishes teaching civics to fifth-graders in South Boston, film photography, playing the violin, and doodling henna designs on friends.
Kashish looks forward to two years at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar studying military history.