Noël Um-Lo Awarded NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship
Programs in Anthropology are proud to announce that Noël Um-Lo has been awarded the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Noël is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Anthropology and has received this fellowship to support the completion of her dissertation project, "Resettlement Schools and The Sacred and Secular Politics of Korean Unification."
The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship encourages a new generation of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and professional fields to undertake research relevant to the improvement of education. This fellowship supports candidates whose dissertation projects bring innovative and insightful approaches to the history, theory, analysis, or application of formal and informal education. As a highly competitive initiative, this fellowship annually identifies and supports 35 of the most exceptional researchers conducting dissertation studies relevant to education.
Noël's ethnographic research examines politics, education, and religion within the North Korean diaspora across China, South Korea, and the United States. Her work explores how states and civil society institutions map religious and political meaning onto the experience of displacement. Specifically, she traces the social life of South Korean unification as it moves beyond state ideology and becomes an infrastructural logic—one that mediates access to education, recognition, and belonging for North Korean displaced youth. At its core, her project asks what it means to be folded into a nation's future while being excluded from its present.
We congratulate Noël on this great achievement!