Kashish Bastola is a 2026 Marshall Scholar and Harvard senior from McKinney, Texas studying 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. He serves on the Radcliffe Institute's Student advisory Board and the City of Cambridge American Freedmen Commission. Kashish looks forward to two years at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar studying military history.

kashishbastola [at] college.harvard.edu