Faculty of Asian Studies, The Australian National University

Lecturer, Korea Centre Email: Ruth.Barraclough@anu.edu.au Phone: + 61 2 6125 3438 Fax: + 61 2 6125 3144 Room: e309 Baldessin Precinct Building

Dr Ruth Barraclough

Educational Background

PhD, Australian National University, 2004

Selected Publications

• (ed.) with Elyssa Faison, Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class, London, Routledge. 2009. See http://www.routledge-ny.com/books/Gender-and-Labour-in-Korea-and-Japan-isbn9780415776639
• Slum Romance in Korean Factory Girl Literature, in R. Barraclough and E. Faison (eds), Gender and Labour in Japan and Korea: Sexing Class, London: Routledge, 2009.
• with E. Faison, The Entanglements of Sexual and Industrial Labour, in R. Barraclough and E. Faison (eds), Gender and Labour in Japan and Korea: Sexing Class, London: Routledge, 2009.
• Tales of Seduction: factory girls in Korean proletarian literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, 14:2, Fall 2006, Duke University Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v014/14.2barraclough.html
• When Korean Working-Class Women Began to Write Ch'angjakkwa Bip'yông [Creation and Criticism] Vol 127, Spring 2005, Seoul : Ch'angbi, pp.289-313 (translated into Korean).

Forthcoming and Under Review

(ed.) with Hwasook Nam, Narratives of South Korean Working-Class Women, special edition of Korean Studies Review, December 2009

Research Activities

Korean Factory Girls: Literature and the Seductions of Capitalism. Book manuscript

Research Interests

• Korean labour history and gender studies
• The factory girl in Korean literature
• Proletarian literature and the Red Decade
• Korean kisaeng and sexual slavery in high art
• Red Love in colonial Korea

Current Research Projects

Red Love in the Global 1920s I am finishing up an article on the heroines of Red Love in colonial Korea that looks at the scandalous and glamorous stories that circulated about them in the popular media, coverage that would be crucial in giving socialism a wide audience in the 1920s and early 1930s. In particular I explore why Red Love had such a large impact in colonial Korea compared to socialist communities elsewhere. The article goes on to examine what happened to the glamorous heroines of Red Love after they went to North Korea and the purges began.

Lone Women in Liberated Korea This article examines the emergence of a new social problem in the Liberation Period (1945-50): the lone woman (war widow, abandoned wife, lone mother, single returnee from the war industries of the former Japanese Empire, etc). It takes as its archive women’s magazines from the period, in particular advice columns, interviews, feature articles and cartoons to show how women advised themselves and each other to rebuild their lives after war and occupation. I analyse how it happened that in this famously open period immediately following Liberation, discourses on female sexuality hardened into pieties that euthanized open discussion of women’s wartime experiences.

Previous positions

• Lecturer, Department of History, University of Minnesota 2006-7
• Korean Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sydney 2004-5

Courses Taught

I teach two history courses, Modern Korea and the course East Asian Women and War. I also teach in the second year Korean language program with Dr Kyung-Joo Yoon. In addition, I am developing a new literature seminar course for advanced undergraduates, tentatively entitled Classics of Modern Korean Literature.

ASIA2040 Modern Korea
ASIA2166 East Asian Women and War
KORE2521 Modern Korean 3
KORE2522 Modern Korean 4