Selected as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar for 2023 and 2024

Professor Kim Han-byul from the Department of Korean Language and Literature has been selected as a Fulbright visiting scholar for the years 2023 and 2024.

The Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program is one of the scholarship programs administered by the Fulbright Foundation. Professor Kim applied for this program made available to current professors and experts at universities in Korea and was selected as a candidate by Fulbright Korea in December last year, later being approved by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in April. Professor Kim’s research topic was 'A Study on the New-Dialect Formation of Korean-American Korean.'

This selection comes after a highly competitive process for recipients of the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program. In 2021, the program expanded from the existing Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts to Natural Sciences and Engineering. Professor Kim is one of a total of 20 recipients drawn from across these diverse fields.

The scholarship recipients can stay in the United States for up to a year while receiving six to 10 months of funding, depending on the specific type of program. For the 2024 research year, Professor Kim will be a visiting scholar at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Oregon while studying the forms of Korean spoken by Korean residents in America in terms of dialect contact. His research aims to understand how dialectal features interact to create new dialects in Korean communities where speakers from different dialectal regions of Korea live together.

“Even though the United States is home to the largest number of Korean residents outside of Korea, no scholar has ever studied the Korean language of Korean residents in America from a dialectal and micro-sociolinguistic perspective. As such, I believe that this research has not only pure linguistic significance but also applied linguistic value, as its results may have implications for language policies and language education for overseas Korean residents in the future. I believe that Fulbright Korea also sees the value in that,” said Professor Kim. “I am grateful to Professor Chae Seo-young for helping me with my application to this program,” he added, thanking the Sociolinguistics major from the Department of English Literature and Linguistics.