The Taliesin Prize

The Taliesin Prize for Distinction in the Art of Learning - named for the early poet famed for enlightenment and inspiration—was established by the Division of Arts & Humanities in 2020. It is awarded to three graduating seniors who best exhibit a spirit of intellectual adventure in their curricular paths as Harvard undergraduates.

While many prizes take as their starting point conventional standards of academic excellence like a student’s GPA or exemplary thesis, the Taliesin Prize takes a holistic look at a student’s curricular choices. Nominated students are not necessarily those with the most accomplishments, the highest number of courses taken, or the most distinctive joint concentration. The Prize Committee examines the transcripts of nominated students for evidence of intrinsic curiosity, and an indication that the student deliberately charted a path through the curriculum that reflects courage, creativity, and exploration.

Nominations for the Taliesin Prize are made by faculty members in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the spring semester. Faculty members should email a short statement that includes the student’s name, email address, and your perspective on why the student meets the Prize criteria to arts-hum@fas.harvard.edu. Nominated students will have the opportunity to submit a short written response about their curricular pathways before Prize selection.

The deadline for submitting Spring 2026 nominations is April 24th.

While the Prize is awarded by the Division of Arts & Humanities, the Prize Committee is made up of faculty from all Divisions and will provide no privilege when considering a student with an Arts & Humanities concentration. Nominations are welcome from every undergraduate concentration.

For questions, please contact arts-hum@fas.harvard.edu

Winners of the 2025 Taliesin Prize

Winners were selected by the Taliesin Prize Committee: Joshua D. Greene, Professor of Psychology; Harry R. Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science; Catherine McKenna, Margaret Brooks Robinson Research Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures; Melanie Matchett Wood, William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics; and Dean D. Kelly, Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy, Dean of Arts and Humanities.

Rhea Acharya:

"Beginning college during the pandemic, I was drawn to how math offered an elegant way to find clarity in a messy world. Through probability, machine learning, systems programming, and microeconomics, I learned to model complexity with precision, where every line of code and every proof had its place. But making systems work in theory was easy; making them matter to people was harder.

In CS1260: Fairness and Privacy, I saw how classification algorithms, built with good intentions, can encode harm. While technical solutions are easy to ideate, committing to the right one requires philosophical grounding. In my thesis, I explored how personified LLMs might guide fairer algorithmic choices, bringing human values closer to computational systems.

While wrestling with the limits of technical clarity, I found myself drawn elsewhere: to novels that mapped lives across centuries; to creative-writing workshops, where meaning emerged through the shaping of sentences; to animation, where syncing split-second frames shaped fluid narratives; to French, where I stumbled through tenses until others understood. In philosophy, I studied theories of happiness and Hegel’s visions of history, grappling with how ideas shape our world and my place in it.

Senior spring, I entered the architecture studio—merging geometries, computing tangent angles, folding paper—to use math to imagine spaces that are accessible, sturdy, and beautiful. Whether drafting floorplans, writing proofs, or editing stories, I came to understand that clarity is never just technical. It’s an act of empathy, where we anticipate how others might experience what we create and try to meet them there."

Sam Rhee:

"I came into college excited about the rigor of form: learning how to structure a proof, how to close-read a poem. In my first writing seminar, I printed a story and cut it into fragments on my desk, rearranging the pieces until something clicked.

By the end of sophomore year, though, the study of form had become mechanical. I was good at mimicking structures, but no longer felt what they were for. I sought philosophy to guide me. Reading Weber and the Frankfurt school on disenchantment, I came to realize my disillusionment had a cultural analogue in the loss of faith in inherited structures.

Yet many of the German theorists held out hope for the beautiful life, inseparable from the life full of art. Elaine Scarry’s seminar on Thomas Hardy taught me to love literature again with an intellectually eclectic approach far from my formalist beginnings.

The similarly eclectic Thinking Through Writing, an English/physics course I returned to TF, showed the interconnection between two disciplines I had once seen as independent interests. The boundary conditions of the early universe and the symmetries in group theory were not “forms that the strength had left” but continuing sources of beauty, which I realized was what I was really chasing.

My first and last semesters I studied Plato’s Symposium. At eighteen, I saw the life of thought as a straight climb, the Ladder of Love. But really I’ve come to better understand myself in circling."

Jonathan Schneiderman:

"The critics and mentors who have meant the most to me share a common trait of worldliness. By this I mean, on the one hand, extensive interaction with the world on the direct and personal level; for this I do not generally look to my courses but try rather to cultivate it by talking to lots of people and seeking out new and strange experiences. On the other hand, I also mean having read an enormous number of books, watched an enormous number of movies, learned an enormous amount of history, and so forth. The individuals by whom I am most inspired bring to bear on the world a tremendous frame of reference on which they draw to educe insights about cultural objects and political developments, insights that I find remarkable and illuminating. This frame of reference I can barely fathom; but once upon a time even Susan Sontag and Tom Conley were infants; and, as there are no shortcuts to breadth, their route to it must have been the same as that available to me. My goal in selecting my courses, then, has been to take those through which my own frame of reference might be most expanded."