[1] The family moved due to her father's new jobs: first during his time in Melbourne University to Croydon, Victoria, where she was educated at Croydon State School, and later to the United Kingdom, after he began his sabbatical at Balliol College, Oxford, doing work for A History of Australia and where she was educated at nearby Oxford High School.
[1] When the family returned to Australia, she was educated at Canberra High School, where she was their athletics champion; at Janet Clarke Hall, University of Melbourne, where she got her BA with honours in 1963 as a Russian major; and at Australian National University, where she got her MA with honours in 1967.
[1][2] She obtained her PhD from the Yale University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1971; her dissertation The Image of the Intelligent in Soviet Prose Fiction, 1917–1932 was supervised by Michael Holquist.
[10] Clark and Dobrenko were co-editors of Soviet Culture and Power, a 2005 volume in Yale University Press' Annals of Communism Series.
[1] She was given the honorable mention for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies' 2012 Heldt Prize Best Book by a Woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies for her book Moscow, the Fourth Rome, which focuses on the intellectual life of 1930s Moscow.
[1] Her son Nicholas recalled that she was an enthusiastic bicycle rider "just about everywhere in the New Haven, Connecticut area, well into her 70s", and that she would often go to Vermont to hike with her family.