Professors Jie Park and Michael Bamberg will spend time abroad next year, each to conduct research and teach courses as Fulbright Scholars, a program of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
“We are incredibly proud to see our Clark faculty recognized with Fulbright fellowships,” wrote Jennifer A. Hanselman, associate provost and dean of research. “These awards are a testament to the depth and rigor of their scholarship, and they reflect the values articulated in Clark’s mission — academic excellence, global engagement, and a commitment to meaningful change. Drs. Bamberg and Park will bring their experiences back to the classroom and to their research, enriching the learning environment for our students and strengthening our connections around the world.”
Park, associate professor of education, received a Fulbright Award to South Korea for spring 2026. Through her project, “Poetry translation and critical English language teaching,” Park will lead practice-based seminars and workshops for graduate students and English language educators at Korea University and Sogang University using Poetry Inside Out (PIO), an education program that supports students of all ages and language backgrounds to translate poetry from around the world, from the poem’s original language into English.
“In PIO, translation is an interpretive and creative act that facilitates language acquisition and critical literacy,” Park says.
For research, Park plans to conduct a qualitative inquiry, investigating how English language educators in South Korea implement translation and critical pedagogies in their classrooms. Her project will run from February through August 2026.
“This Fulbright award allows me to join a network of scholars and practitioners who approach English education in a global context and supports me to refine a theory of translation as a critical literacy practice — a framework that I’ve written about, but only from a U.S.-centric perspective,” Park says. “I hope to establish relationships of reciprocity and knowledge generation where I can learn, contribute, and connect people, ideas, and institutions.”
Park says the Fulbright award is more than just an incredible professional accomplishment.
“I am looking forward to the challenges and rewards of living, working, and learning in South Korea — a country where I spent my childhood,” Park said.
A language and literacy scholar, Park studies immigrant youth and their literacy and language practices in out-of-school and school-based settings. She has conducted longitudinal studies in Philadelphia and Bronx, New York, where she investigated how first-generation immigrant students acquire academic discourses, and what cultural and linguistic resources they bring to their schooling. She is currently involved in research projects around teacher and youth-research, multicultural and multilingual curricula in high school classrooms, and the intersection of youth literacy, language, and identities.
Bamberg, professor of psychology, received a Fulbright to Poland to serve as a Distinguished Scholar in Humanities and Social Sciences at Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU).
During Bamberg’s project, which will take place from February to June 2026, he will accomplish three things: collaborate on a joint narrative/storytelling, identity and change project with Joanna Pawelczyk, dean of the Faculty of English at AMU, related to her Fulbright research on women in the US Military; teach his signature course, Qualitative Theory & Analysis, to graduate students; and give several lectures and consultation sessions, with the goal of establishing a Qualitative Lab in Discourse and Narrative Analytics, a workshop-like space that will enable scholars in the humanities and social sciences to collaborate around issues of interpretation and sense-making in the different disciplines.
If this experience feels a bit like déjà vu to Professor Bamberg, there’s a reason for that.
He received a Fulbright to AMU in the spring of 2020; however, just after getting settled in Poznań, all Fulbrighters were called back due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When he learned about this award, Bamberg says, “I was particularly thrilled, since this is my second Fulbright award. I wasn’t imagining that this was achievable.
“Receiving the Fulbright Award for a second time, coinciding with the point of 40 years of service to Clark University, is highly gratifying — indicating something like a high point of my scholarly activities — being recognized nationally as well as internationally,” he says.
Bamberg says he feels much better prepared to fulfill his Fulbright award next year.
“Having had the initial contact with students and colleagues at AMU in 2020, particularly with my host Professor Pawelczyk, I feel that our joint project has matured in ways to lead to an even more successful collaboration,” Bamberg says.
And as the next conference of the Association of European Qualitative Researchers in Psychology will take place in Kraków in spring 2026, while he’s still in Poland, Bamberg says he “intends to have a strong presence with a good number of colleagues and graduate students to present aspects of our collaborative efforts there.”
There is one thing Professor Bamberg intends to do before his Fulbright next year that he didn’t do the first time around.
“In my first days in Poland in 2020, during our introductory meeting in Torun, it became embarrassingly apparent that I was one of the few [Fulbrighters] who wasn’t able to count in Polish,” he says. “This needs to change.”
Bamberg’s research is in Discourse and Identity with an emphasis on how Narratives (particularly “Small Stories”) are employed as general sense-making and identity-building strategies. Methodologically, he approaches the study of identity microanalytically (microgenetically) as an emergent process that is deeply embedded in local and situated contexts. Professor Bamberg has served as associate dean of the College and as director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and currently serves as president of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (APA-Division 5).
Every year, more than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, and more than 40 Clark faculty scholars have previously received these awards.
