Michigan State University student Sydney Logsdon has been named a finalist for the Marshall Scholarship, which provides support to approximately 50 of the most outstanding undergraduates in the country to pursue graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom.
MSU has produced 20 Marshall Scholars to date.
Logsdon is an Honors College senior majoring in English in the College of Arts & Letters, and Environmental Studies and Sustainability in the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources.
She plans to pursue a Master of Arts degree in Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol in the UK for the first year, followed by a Master of Letters in English Literature: Modernities – Literature, Culture, Theory at the University of Glasgow for the second year.
Logsdon is currently engaged in five concurrent research projects.
Her honors thesis research focuses on how the environment is conceptualized in ecological fiction. It is supervised by Professor Ellen McCallum in the Department of English, and Film Studies.
For the past four years, Logsdon has been a research assistant to Professor Natalie Phillips in the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab on four separate projects that focus on art created during COVID-19, narrative responses to music, the aesthetic pleasures of poetry, and the role of art therapy in hospitals.
Since 2023, she has served as a research assistant to Professor Julian Chambliss in the Department of English on a project that maps historical Black spaces. This research has resulted in four publications and over 15 local, national, and international conference presentations.
Logsdon is also president of two student organizations, an undergraduate research advisor, a representative on academic governance, and a member of the College of Arts & Letters Dean Search Committee.
She is from Lake Orion, Michigan and graduated from Lake Orion High School.
This story originally appeared on the Honors College website.