2 LT Miranda Bass, USMA ‘18

A double major in International Relations and Chinese, Cadet Bass became immersed in Holocaust and genocide studies in 2016-17.  She wrote that “taking your genocide and mass atrocity class and participating in the Joint Service Academies Mass Atrocity Prevention Symposium (JSAMAPS) changed my entire worldview and my life.” Her political science thesis focused on the early 1880s Russian anti-Jewish pogroms.  CDT Bass applied a model of mass atrocity prediction recently developed by Dr. Scott Straus and asked why, when there were so many indicators predicting that a mass atrocity would occur, the 1881-2 pogroms did not metastasize into a mass atrocity.  As a cadet, she studied in the United Kingdom and Israel, and attended National Taiwan University for a semester.  Due to her fluency in Chinese, she served as language support in the annual Army-Army Dialogue Mechanism between the United States and China, representing West Point and the Army. Beyond academics, Miranda served as the Cadet-in-Charge of the Glee Club and West Point’s Hillel, and she was a member of West Point’s String Ensemble.  She will pursue a degree in Security and Diplomacy Studies at Tel Aviv University as a Fulbright Scholar