His autobiographical novels Memories of My Ghost Brother and Skull Water are widely taught at colleges and universities.
He was a member of the editorial board for Harvard University's Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture from its inception until 2017.
He previously served as coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and was director of The Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY New Paltz.
co-edited with Walter K. Lew (Beacon, 2002) Century of the Tiger: 100 Years of Korean Culture in America, co-edited with Jenny Ryun Foster and Frank Stewart (University of Hawaii Press, 2002) Fenkl also edited a special section in Harvard University's Azalea, Volume 2, 2009 on North Korean Literature and coedited a special section in Azalea, Volume 7, 2014 on Korean American Literature.| Translations: The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung (Penguin Classics, 2019) Tales from the Temple by Musan Cho Oh-hyun (Codhill Press, 2019) The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea by Bandi (Zed Books, 2019) For Nirvana: 108 Zen Poems by Musan Cho Oh-hyun (Columbia University Press, 2016) Meeting with My Brother by Yi Mun-yol (Weatherhill Books on Asia, 2017) A section of Fenkl's translation of the Kim Man-jung's 17th-century Buddhist masterpiece, The Nine Cloud Dream, also appeared in AZALEA, Volume 7, 2014.
Publishers Weekly writes that "Man-Jung’s tale is a hypnotic journey, a scholarly, instructive Buddhist bildungsroman set across Tang dynasty China, and in Insu Fenkl’s skilled translation, a glimpse into the rich crossroads of religions and society...".
He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, where he began a project collecting narrative folktales and studied literary translation.