Associate Professor Ruth Barraclough
Areas of expertise
- Culture, Gender, Sexuality 200205
- Asian History 210302
- Historical Studies 2103
- Literary Studies 2005
- Biography 210304
- Korean Literature 200521
Research interests
I have broad interests in labour history, gender studies, literary translation and biography. My book Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea was published by University of California Press in 2012. The book is about the factory girls who generated Korea’s industrial revolution while at the same time cherished ambitions to be writers, novelists and poets. In July 2017 Factory Girl Literature translated by Professors Kim Won and Jiseung Roh was published in Korea by Humanitas Press. It spent 20 weeks on the history bestseller list and received numerous recommendations: nominated for the President'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, named one of the top ten books of 2017 by Kyunghyang Shinmun.
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 Paula Rabinowitz and Heather Bowen-Struyk, Palgrave 2015.
Biography
In 1989 I first visited South Korea on an exchange program for university students organised by the Korean Student Christian Federation and the Australian Student Christian Movement. I returned to Korea as an international student in January 1992 and studied Korean language at Yonsei University and Ewha Womans University.
In 1997 I returned to South Korea as a PhD student, observed first hand the General Strike in winter of that year and in 1998 studied at Seoul National University and at the Labor Academy at Sungkonghoe University.
I received my PhD in East Asian Studies from the ANU in 2004 with a thesis entitled The Labour and Literature of Korean Factory Girls. In 2004-5 I was postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Sydney and in 2006-7 I was Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. I came to the ANU in June 2007.
I go to Korea every winter and am on the editorial board of the journal of the Korean Association of Women's History and am an international corresponding member of the Korean Association for Feminist Literature.
I was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Korean Studies, Columbia University 2013-14 and 2017. In 2018 I was a National Library of Australia Fellow working on my new biographical history Red Glamour: Korea's Early Communist Women.
Researcher's projects
My next book Island Ablaze, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2021. Co-edited with Jin-kyung Lee, Jae-Yong Kim and Sang-kyung Lee, Island Ablaze is an anthology of short stories that delve into Korea's relationship with the United States. For the anthology I have translated Choi Jeong-hui's classic 1942 short story Dawn about women graduates of an American missionary school in Seoul.
I am co-authoring a biographical history Red Glamour: Korea's Early Communist Women with Professor Jiseung Roh from Incheon National University. Research for this book has encompassed the State Archive for Social and Political History in Moscow, the National Library of Australia, the Library of Congress in Washington, the FSB Archives in Kuznetsky Most and many other collections.
A public lecture about the project Red Glamour from the National Library of Australia public seminar series can be found here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6GgUt1Slyw
I am preparing a manuscript of translated stories, interviews and newspaper ephemera by and about kisaeng (Korean courtesans) with Professor Jiseung Roh for the Modern Languages Association bilingual Texts and Translation Series.
Administrative Roles
Ruth is the Convenor of the Northeast Asian Studies Program.
Board and Service Memberships
Member of the Australia-Korea Foundation Board, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (from 2018)
Chair of the Korea Institute Board, ANU (Member from 2017, Chair from 2020)
James Palais Book Prize in Korean Studies for the Association of Asian Studies, Committee Member 2019, Chair 2020.
Publications
- Barraclough, R 2019, 'Political Travel at Cold War's End', in Sunyoung Park (ed), Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s Korea, University of Michigan Press, 2019.
- Barraclough, R. 2018, 'Factory Girl Literature across the World', in Rabinowitz P (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, http://literature.oxfordre.com/
- Barraclough, R 2017, Yokong Munhak, (Translated by Kim Won and Roh Jiseung) Seoul: Humanitas Press.
- Barraclough, R 2015, 'Red Love in Korea: Rethinking Communism, Feminism, Sexuality', in Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz (ed.), Red Love Across the Pacific. Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 23-37pp.
- Barraclough, R, Bowen-Struyk, H & Rabinowitz, P, eds, 2015, Red Love Across the Pacific Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
- Barraclough, R, Bowen-Struyk, H & Rabinowitz, P 2015, 'Introduction Sex, Texts, Comrades', in Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz (ed.), Red Love Across the Pacific. Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. xi-1.
- Barraclough, R 2014, 'A history of sex work in modern Korea', in Mark McLelland and Vera Mackie (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia, Routledge, New York, pp. 294-304.
- Barraclough, R 2014. ‘Red Love and Betrayal in the Making of North Korea: Comrade Hô Jông-suk’, History Workshop Journal Vol 77:1, Spring 2014. https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/77/1/86/571826
- Barraclough, R 2013, Review of O Chong-hui, River of Fire And Other Stories (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012) in Journal of Asian Studies vol 72, issue 3, August 2013.
- Barraclough, R 2013, translation of 'Darkness' [Odum] 1937 by Kang Kyong-ae in Rat Fire: Korean Stories From the Japanese Empire, edited by Theodore Hughes, Kim Jae-yong, Lee Kin-kyung and Lee Sang-kyung, Cornell East Asia Series, 2013.
- Barraclough, R 2012, Factory Girl Literature Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Barraclough, R 2012, 'The Courtesan's Journal: Kisaeng and the Sex Labour Market in Colonial Korea', Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, vol. December 2012, no. 29, pp. 1-9. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue29/barraclough.htm
- Barraclough, R 2012, 'Review of book by Jin-kyung Lee Service Economies: Militarism, Sex work and Migrant labor in South Korea'.
- Barraclough, R 2011, 'Girl-Love and Suicide: Re-reading Shin Kyong-suk's The Solitary Room', Comparative Korean Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 307-337.
- Barraclough, R 2011, 'Red love: an intimate history of the making of North Korea', Asian Currents, vol. July, no. 2011, pp. 15-17.
- Barraclough, R & Faison, E, eds, 2009, Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing class, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA.
- Barraclough, R & Faison, E 2009, 'The entanglements of sexual and industrial labour', in Ruth Barraclough and Elyssa Faison (ed.), Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing class, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA, pp. 1-9.
- Barraclough, R 2009, 'Slum romance in Korea: factory girl literature', in Ruth Barraclough and Elyssa Faison (ed.), Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing class, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA, pp. 60-77.
- Barraclough, R & Nam, H 2009, 'Guest Editors Introduction', Review of Korean Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 7-11.
- Barraclough, R 2008, 'I was one of Nelson's nine academic victims', in Barbara Nelson and Robin Jeffrey (ed.), Capturing the Year 2008, Australian National University, Canberra Australia, pp. 47-49.
- Barraclough, R 2008, 'Red Love and Socialist Modernity in the Creation of North Korea', The literature of Liberation Space: A conference on Korean Literature 1945 - 1950, ed. Clark Sorenson and David McCann, Conference Organising Committee, USA, 20pages.
- Barraclough, R 2006, 'Tales of Seduction: factory girls in Korean proletarian literature', positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 345-371.
- Barraclough, R 2005, 'When Korean Working-Class Women Began to Write', Changjak gwa Bipyeong (Creation and Criticism), vol. 127, pp. 289-313.
- Barraclough, R 2005, 'Book review: Voices From the Straw Mat: Toward and Ethnography of Korean Story Singing & The Voices of Governor-General and other stories of Modern Korea', Asian Studies Review, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 210-212.
Projects and Grants
Grants information is drawn from ARIES. To add or update Projects or Grants information please contact your College Research Office.
- 2011 Overseas Leading University Program for Korean Studies (Secondary Investigator)