Seeking the Humane Path: Toshaani Goel Named 2024 Smith Scholar
Toshaani Goel ’24 entered Davidson College planning to become a doctor and convinced that humanities studies would make her a better one. Her time here cemented that conviction. She thinks aspiring professionals in any field — from physicians and lawyers to financiers and engineers — can benefit from a strong liberal arts education.
“I embody the liberal arts motto,” she said. “I believe in engaging all parts of your brain. You can develop skills in any career; a liberal arts education teaches you how to think and how to use what you’ve learned in vastly different classes to make your world a better place.”
Goel graduated magna cum laude in Global Literary Theory and will continue her education next year in the United Kingdom as a 2024 Smith Scholar. She’ll study for a master’s degree in cultural, intellectual and visual history of the Renaissance at the University of London’s Warburg Institute.
Davidson’s W. Thomas Smith Scholarship honors graduating seniors for outstanding academic achievement, leadership, character, and community service. It models scholarships such as the Rhodes and Fulbright and pays for a year of graduate study abroad. This year, there are two Smith Scholars. The other is Lilly Sirover ’24, featured in a separate article.
With her extensive knowledge and talent across multiple disciplines, Goel’s mentors and friends at Davidson envision multiple possibilities for her future, ranging from physician to art curator and academic to global politics — even heading a country someday.
Whatever Toshaani pursues, she’ll be an extraordinary leader. She’s one of the most curious people I’ve ever met. She’s so bright and always in search of answers, and when that leads to more questions, she’ll seek those answers, too.
Goel is a native of India. Porges, her husband, Julio Ramirez (Davidson's R. Stuart Dickson Professor of Psychology), and their children were Goel’s host family during her four years at Davidson.
“There was this immediate connection,” said Porges, who first meet Goel on a Zoom call. “My kids love her too; she’s become so much a part of our family. Toshaani sees the humor in everything. She could come over to our house after a bad day and within two minutes we’d all be laughing. We plan on going to visit her in the UK — and wherever she lands after that.”
For the Love of Humanities
Goel grew up in the city of Chandigarh in northwest India. Her mother, Bharti, is a physician, her father, Sameer, is a software engineer. She has a younger sister, Presha, who is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College.
She spent her early years rooted in a strong STEM education. She attended a Catholic convent school in India, and the science, technology and mathematics focus was as dominant as the daily religious rituals of the nuns who taught her. Goel says that even in the STEM-dominated environment, her parents stressed the importance of arts and literature as integral to understanding the world.
That motivation propelled her to a broader humanities and arts curriculum at Mahindra United World College of India for her last two years of high school. Art and literature became viable studies, not just hobbies pursued outside of class.
Goel was thrilled to receive a full James B. Duke Scholarship to attend Davidson, where she frequented science research labs and art galleries, led outdoor expeditions and packed a schedule filled with her diverse interests.
She said her work with mentors during her early years at Davidson inspired and enlightened her.
“Dr. Scott Denham taught me my first lesson in theory in an independent study and I couldn’t be more grateful for such an introduction,” she said. “Dr. Amanda Ewington made me fall in love with literature anew, but this time it was not just the thrill of reading a new story but the ways it can be analyzed and broken down to show the cultural and intellectual history that it is a product of.”
By her second year, she was selected as a humanities fellow and as an intern at the college’s Van Every/Smith Galleries.
Lia Newman, director and curator of the galleries, recalls Goel attending online art events and lectures during the early pandemic days before working as an intern for the next three years. Goel wrote blogs for the galleries and even created her own art. In 2022, she won a best of show award for her sculpture in the college’s annual student art contest.
Sculpture by Goel
“She has this incredible enthusiasm for the things happening at the galleries, and the way her brain could make connections from artist to artist was impressive — she gets it,” Newman said. “She developed and planned gallery programs and was always thinking of ways to engage other students. She was on a mission to have people recognize how much the galleries offer, and how important art is in our world.”
As Goel became absorbed in the work of the artists, writers, historians and philosophers she studied — and in some cases met — at Davidson, questioning identity became a recurring theme.
“How are they formed?” she asked. “How do they get deployed, and how do they impact the lives of people?”
A blog post topic she thought of while working in the galleries led to her senior honors thesis, "Locating Identities in a World of Inevitable Hybridity: Yinka Shonibare CBE RA and Nicholas Galanin as Postcolonial Theorists."
Professors Patricio Boyer and Caroline Fache served as her thesis advisors.
“I brought a kernel of an idea about the divided views regarding cultural ownership that I found in the two artists, and thanks to them, it has become the grounding principle of the work that is ahead of me,” she said. “I view postcolonial studies as a critical project of questioning identities, which is often mistaken for determining them instead. This skill of humane interrogation is my advisors’ greatest lesson to me.”
In the personal statement for her Smith Scholarship application, she reflected on the wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas. Questions about citizenship, identity and territorial rights teem through these and other global conflicts, she said, which makes her studies especially important.
Boyer, the E. Craig Wall Jr. Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and director of the college’s Humanities Program, cites Goel’s thesis preparation as an example of her relentless pursuit of learning.
Toshaani is exceptional; she’s one of the best students I’ve had in my career. I told her she’d have an unbelievable amount of work to do, and she did it. I’d give her a couple of chapters to read, and she’d come back having read the whole book. There’s a raw curiosity that’s rare and an unmitigated humility about what she knows, and what she doesn’t know. I wish we could bottle it. By the time she graduated she was a full-blown intellectual.
A Future Focused on Others
Studying the humanities while balancing a heavy pre-med courseload has prepared Goel for many different paths.
“Toshaani is really good at these two radically different things,” Boyer said. “I hope she ends up in the humanities, but she'd also be an amazing doctor. Whatever she does she’ll be at the top of the heap, thinking about what she’s responsible for in the world.”
Goel believes her future will always include a focus on people, and how she can learn and raise awareness about the struggles of war, poverty, oppression and other injustices. Possibilities abound for her to work toward her goals for a kinder, more peaceful, sustainable and healthy world.
At Davidson, I really sought to understand the human condition, and humanities allowed me to do that. The world is what it is because we are part of the different nations, histories and cultures we’ve experienced. All of our realities are tangential to that.
“I’m grateful to Davidson for providing me with a community of friends — really family — for life. Davidson deeply challenged me, while always letting me know I was supported."
The Smith Scholarship competition is administered through the Office of Fellowships. For more information about the Office of Fellowships or applying for the Smith Scholarship, visit davidson.edu/fellowships.