Following a competitive selection process, Endicott College has named Kyungmin Park and Elizabeth Winthrop as its newest Distinguished Professors.
Joining the company of Elizabeth Matelski and Dina Gentile, the three-year professorship will provide dedicated time to pursue innovative scholarship and visionary work while continuing to inspire students in the classroom.
“Creative scholarship is an important part of what makes Endicott such a dynamic academic community,” said Provost Sara Quay. “Through the Distinguished Professorship, Professors Park and Winthrop will have the opportunity to push their work in new directions while continuing to inspire and engage their students.”
Clay, Culture, and Connection
For Park, the professorship opens the door to expanding her ceramic practice into more immersive, installation-based projects that explore migration, cultural identity, memory, and the experience of living between cultures.
Those themes are personal for Park, whose work has been shaped by her experience of moving from South Korea to the U.S. at 20 and navigating life between two cultures.
“Learning a new language and adapting to a different culture made me much more aware of how we communicate, how we are perceived by others, and how our sense of identity can shift depending on where we are,” she said.
An accomplished ceramist, Park has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues including The Clay Studio, Fuller Craft Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and Aqua Art Miami Basel. Her work has also been featured in The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.
At the heart of her work are questions about what we carry with us when we leave one place for another, what changes, and what stays with us, and Park explores how objects and spaces can express memories and cultural experiences that are often difficult to put into words.
“I hope my work can connect with people beyond the Endicott community, including artists, students, and broader audiences who may have their own experiences of migration, cultural transition, or living between different places,” she said.
At the same time, Park will be participating in the Artist in Residence Program through the Office for the Arts at Harvard University, where she will have a dedicated space and access to a fully equipped ceramics facility and a larger ceramics community in Boston.
“Having both the time provided by the Distinguished Professorship and the resources and community at Harvard will give me an important opportunity to research, experiment, and push the work in new directions,” she said.
“And as Endicott’s program continues to grow, I hope to bring back a clearer understanding of how expanded space and resources can open up new possibilities for our Endicott students.”
Writing Beyond Victim and Villain
The author of five books, Winthrop will spend the next three years writing a novel that ventures into the world of online scamming, examining deception, inequality, and the unexpected connection that can form between scammer and scammed.
The idea began close to home. In the fall of 2024, one of Winthrop’s close friends fell victim to what’s referred to as a pig butchering scam, in which fraudsters spend months building trust before persuading their target to pour money into a fake investment platform. After witnessing the pain and shame that followed, Winthrop knew there was a story she wanted to tell.
What originally started as a screenplay is now a book that follows two people: an American victim of the scam, and the young Ghanaian scammer on the other end of the phone or computer screen.
“I learned that the scammers themselves are very often trapped in circumstances that make scamming look like the only viable option, in a country where youth unemployment is severe even among the university-educated,” said Winthrop. “That recognition—that both people in this exchange are, in different ways, casualties of the same global inequities—is the question the whole project grew out of.”
Since starting the project, the scale of the topic has only grown. As Winthrop noted, the FBI’s most recent report, released this spring, found that cryptocurrency investment fraud alone cost Americans $7.2 billion in 2025.
Globally, one study estimates that pig butchering networks moved more than $75 billion in stolen funds between 2020 and early 2024, a figure that has climbed since.
“I’d like the book to reach readers who’ve lived through something like this, as well as readers who have no idea the scale of what’s happening, or the human costs on both ends of it,” she said.
Winthrop hopes the novel refuses to let either character be simply a villain or simply a victim. She wants readers to leave the book with a more complicated understanding of scamming—not as a simple crime with a criminal and a mark, but as a relationship, one that often curdles into something disturbingly close to real intimacy before it ends.
“I’m especially looking forward to the slow, unglamorous work of tracking how the relationship between the two of them shifts once the transaction becomes something closer to real feeling,” she said.