Barraclough, Ruth

Consultation/Advisory Hours

Fall 2025: Wednesdays 4:00 - 5:00 pm, Fridays 2:00 - 3:00 pm, and 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 particular interests in gender, biography and literature.

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. In Korea the book spent twenty weeks on the history best-seller list, was nominated for the President’s summer reading list by Korea’s leading book and newspaper editors and named one of the top ten books of 2017.

Her new book Island Ablaze and Other Stories, is published by Cornell University Press in October 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 Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi’s classic 1942 short story Dawn about women graduates of an American missionary school in Seoul who meet again a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Ruth’s next book, co-authored with Professor Jiseung Roh, is Red Glamour: Korea’s Early Communist Women. Research for this book has encompassed 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).

At Columbia, Ruth is the new Faculty Director of the Dual Degree Masters in International and World History with LSE and from January 2025 the Director of the Center for Korean Research at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Before joining Columbia in 2024, Ruth Barraclough served on the faculty at the Australian National University.

Courses

Making Modern Korea

North Korean History

MA/MSc Workshops in Research Skills and Methods