Barraclough, Ruth

Consultation/Advisory Hours

Spring 2025: Wednesdays, 2:30 - 4:30 PM, or by appointment.

Education

BA (Honours) University of Queensland
PhD Australian National University

Interests and Research

Ruth Barraclough is a labor historian of modern Korea with a particular interest in gender, biography and literary history.

Her first book Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea is about the working-class women and girls who generated Korea’s industrialization while cherishing ambitions to be writers, novelists and poets. First published by University of California Press in 2012 it was translated into Korean by Professors Kim Won and Jiseung Roh in 2017 (Humanitas Press) where it spent twenty weeks on the history best-seller list and received numerous recommendations: nominated for President Moon Jae-in’s summer reading list by South Korea’s leading book and newspaper editors, nominated for multiple feminist reading lists, nominated for CEO’s alternative summer reading list, and named one of the top ten books of 2017 by the major daily newspaper Kyunghyang Sinmun.

Her forthcoming book Island Ablaze, will be published by Cornell in 2025. Co-edited with Jin-kyung Lee, Sang-kyung Lee and Jae-Yong Kim, Island Ablaze is an anthology of short stories that delve into Korea’s relationship with the United States. For the anthology Ruth translated Choe Jeonghui’s classic 1942 short story Dawn about women graduates of an American missionary school in Seoul.

Her next book, co-authored with Professor Jiseung Roh, is Red Glamour: Korea’s Early Communist Women. Research for this book has encompassed many collections, including the State Archive for Social and Political History in Moscow, the North Korean collection at the National Library of Australia, The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and the FSB Archive in Kuznetsky Most. Red Glamour is under contract for parallel release in English and Korean.

Earlier collective book projects include Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class, co-edited with Elyssa Faison, (Routledge 2009) and Red Love Across the Pacific, co-edited with Heather Bowen-Struyk and Paula Rabinowitz, (Palgrave 2015).

Ruth first went to South Korea as a seventeen-year-old in 1989, as part of a long running student exchange organized by the Korean Student Christian Federation and the Australian Student Christian Movement. She has written about this episode in her chapter Political Travel at Cold War’s End in Sunyoung Park’s Revisiting Minjung and Korean translation. Prior to coming to Columbia she taught at the Australian National University for seventeen years.

Courses

Making Modern Korea

North Korean History

MA/MSc Workshops in Research Skills and Methods