Programs in Anthropology are proud to announce that program alum Noël Um-Lo has been awarded the 2026 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Research Fellowship. The Spencer Research Fellowship will support Dr. Noël Um-Lo as a Postdoctoral Scholar at GW's Institute for Korean Studies and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where she will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript.

In contexts of protracted conflict, how do time and national imaginaries shape access, belonging, and opportunity for migrant youth? What role do schools play in positioning transnational youth within national projects? Dr. Um-Lo's book project, tentatively titled Embodying Uncertain Futures: Transnational Migrants in Korean National Time, explores these questions through an ethnography of North Korean-background communities in South Korea. Embodying Uncertain Futures will examine schools as key social actors through which competing visions of North Korean migrants' place in Korea's future— those advanced by the state and those imagined by migrants themselves — are created and brought into tension.

Dr. Um-Lo shared her hope that "[her] research draws attention to the agency, capacity and humanity of displaced young people beyond their relationship to state-building projects.”

We congratulate Noël on this wonderful achievement!