A Vicksburg High School grad —and Rhodes Scholar — is headed to Harvard this week to pursue his doctorate.

Donald M. “Field” Brown received his master’s at the University of Oxford this summer.

Brown always thought he would attend good schools, but he never quite imagined the future he would have in academia.

Since he was 10 years old, Brown had dreams of being a literature professor.

“I’ve always loved books. I like to come to the library all the time. I said, ‘I need a job in which I can discuss books all the time,’” he said about his choice of career.

While a student at Mississippi State University working on an English and philosophy degree, Brown’s mentor Christopher Snyder, dean of the honors college, encouraged him to apply for a study abroad program at the University of Oxford in England, which Brown did and enjoyed thoroughly.

He then chose to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, awarded to 32 American college students each year to continue their education at Oxford. After a series of interviews judging how well the 1,000 applicants speak on current events and other topics, Brown was named a Rhodes Scholar.

“You’re in this really cool network of people,” he said. “It sets you up nicely for life afterwards because of the connections.”

At Oxford he earned his master’s degree in modern British and European history.

“Even though I did history at Oxford, it was a very literary based degree,” he said of his study of the connection between American and French writers in post-war France. “I wanted to get a better picture of what it meant for American expatriates to move to France to write.”

He was able to visit most of Western and Central Europe while at Oxford and spent six months studying in Paris. The opportunity to go to Paris happened when he received an Erasmus scholarship to study in any university in Europe.

“I did archival research on these expatriate writers in France,” he said. “I got to hone my French.”

With the people Brown knew and the education he received, he pushed forward and applied to Ivy League schools for his doctorate.

“After Oxford happened, (I thought) I might as well apply to the best schools. I’m already in a really good position,” he said. “It really just happened because of other people leading me in the right direction.”

He was accepted into the schools where he applied, but in the end chose Harvard University as the place where he would continue his education for a number of reasons including the fact that many of his Rhodes friends are also headed to Harvard and because of the school’s reputation for excellence, not to mention the top notch faculty.

His doctorate will be in literature where he will study if certain writers are disregarded because of implications of communism during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s.

“There was a witch hunt and they assumed a lot of people were communist and obviously a lot of them were not,” he said. “So I’m trying to study whether or not we still ignore certain writers because if that bias past… We’ll see if there is anything there.”

Brown said every degree is a step toward reaching his goal of becoming a professor, but he doesn’t want to be just any professor.

“I want to be the type of hands-on professor that is always open to office hours and builds very close relationships with students, especially students who may be first generation students, students who need more help adjusting to college, and be the person they can go to to hash things out,” he said.

He wants all students, especially Mississippi public school students who are told their education is sub-par, to know it simply isn’t true and hard work pays off no matter where a person is from.

“I would hope that this scholarship not only benefits me, but I would hope that it also helps other students, who might not know many people who have left and seen a lot of world, to have this as a model,” he said.

Brown is a 2010 graduate of Vicksburg High School. While at MSU, Brown started a creative writing magazine and participated in multiple organizations including community service clubs and honor societies. He also spent a summer term at Stanford University.

He spent most of August back in Vicksburg with friends and family in between his degrees.

Brown’s parents, Willie and Cynthia Brown, live in Vicksburg. He has a brother, Willie Jr., who is an engineer in Clinton.