Devon Williams Profile by Xavier Latimer
At just four years old, Devon Williams announced to her parents that she would attend Princeton. She had been watching a lot of Disney movies and concluded, from the name alone, that this is the place where one could find her prince. After falling in love with romance languages — she is now a Comparative Literature major in Spanish and Italian at Princeton — Williams maintains she has accomplished both goals.
She will joke about the prince — that is Francesco, her boyfriend. She will not joke about the languages. “I’m definitely the kind of person that is studying exactly what I want to be,” she said. “I don’t really care to study something just because it’ll make me more money.”
That conviction has cost her things. Before Princeton, Williams competed in Grand Prix show jumping with her horse Celine, at a level the University’s club program does not even touch. So she did not join. “I care more about my academics,” she said. “I’ll die on that hill.”
What she made room for instead was journalism, which she minors in and treats as an extension of the same work. Two summers ago, she reported in Italian alongside migrants on a University program in Pisa. This past summer she covered legislation at the state capital, where the range of bills forced a kind of serial expertise. “You kind of have to become an expert to be able to explain them to others,” she said. Then she spent her own money on Rome, Florence and Bologna, alone, and came home with friends.
Her friends describe someone who collects people at that speed by default. Yeonwoo Kook, who joined the Princeton Tiger Lilies a year behind Williams, said half her photographs from rehearsals show Williams embracing those around her, mid-song. Williams has a theory about why the group is close. “Singing psychologically makes you bond more quickly to people,” she said. During beach week, she stopped a screening of Hercules to argue the film is a retelling of the Gospels — a reading the room spent the rest of the movie testing.
Emma Cinocca, who met Williams studying abroad in Italy, offered three words: ambitious, bubbly, aesthete. “She’s a very ambitious and hardworking person, but she also doesn’t take life too seriously,” she said.
The seriousness surfaces around where she comes from. Williams grew up seven minutes from Stanford and describes the Bay Area now as billboards selling AI to AI companies above people sleeping on the street. Asked whether Princeton is its own bubble, she did not argue. “Most places of privilege, including Princeton, are going to be in a bubble.” Asked whether living inside one disqualified her from criticizing another, she said the opposite. “You have to be privileged, at least in some regard, to be able to change that privilege.”
Law school, journalism, or both. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Just wait. I’ll fix it. Don’t worry about it.”
