Korea Foundation Associate Professor, Department of History
Director, Center for Korean Research, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Member, Committee on Global Thought
Ruth is a labor historian of modern Korea with research interests in literary history, biography and gender. She first went to Korea in 1989 on a student exchange program from Australia. Given the choice of Pyongyang or Seoul, she chose Seoul because the students there two years earlier had brought down the military dictatorship.
Her first book Factory Girl Literature was 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 Red Glamour, co-authored with Professor Jiseung Roh, is a biographical history of Korea’s early communist women, due for parallel publication in English and Korean.
Ruth Barraclough has served as Vice-President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023) and as a board member of the Australia Korea Foundation (2018-23) to advise the Australian government on new areas of cooperation between the two countries. In her work for the board, she was instrumental in establishing a Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Seoul National University. 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, the University of Minnesota and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney.
Website
Select Publications
- Island Ablaze and Other Stories: The US Empire in North and South Korean Literatures
- Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea
- Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class
Education
- BA (Hons), University of Queensland
- Certificate in Labor Studies, Sungkonghoe University
- PhD, Australian National University