Carmen Covington
Fall 2025 John Jay Fellow
Hometown: ?
College: Wheaton College
Degree: B.A. in English Literature and International Relations
Raised in Southern California but at home in many places, Carmen joins the John Jay Institute having graduated from Wheaton College in May 2025, where she majored in English Literature and International Relations.
Carmen enjoys navigating unfamiliar cultural contexts and has had the opportunity to do so from an early age thanks to her parents' profession as academics. While enrolled at Wheaton, she spent a summer term and, later, an additional semester in the United Kingdom studying literature and history, spending her semester abroad as an Associate Member of Wycliffe Hall (University of Oxford) via the CCCU’s Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford (SCIO) programme.
Carmen is a member of Sigma Tau Delta, the National Honor Society in English Literature & Letters, and served on the staff of Kodon, Wheaton's literature and art journal, for two years. In her fourth year, she was selected to represent the College at the National Association of Evangelicals’ Young Leaders Conference and at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference. Her fourth-year internship with Women At Risk, International, integrated her experience as a writer and editor with her interests in religious practice, identity, and politics. Her senior thesis for English Literature also brought together her majors by examining representations of faith, nationalism, and Slavophilism in Dostoevsky’s Demons, drawing on her knowledge of political systems and philosophy to complement literary analysis.
While her interest in foreign affairs was sparked by watching Madam Secretary in high school, Carmen is open to using her gifts in a range of sectors after her time at the John Jay Institute. She plans to pursue graduate school alongside a career in public service, with an enduring commitment to life-long learning.
A lifelong lover of music, she leapt at the opportunity to join the Balliol College Chapel Choir during her term in Oxford; her budding interest and subsequent early lessons on the organ were recognized through a scholarship at Wheaton this past year. In her free time, Carmen particularly enjoys tea, long walks, contra dancing, and good books.