Ruth Barraclough, PhD (ANU)

Lecturer, School of Culture, History & Language

Email: Ruth.Barraclough@anu.edu.au

Biographical statement

I grew up in Queensland and first went to Seoul as a teenager in 1989. I recently completed my book Factory Girl Literature, which argues that the factory girl became a crucial figure in modern Korean literature for the way she embodied the violence of industrial life. My new project is a history of early communist women in Korea, provisionally entitled Red Love and Betrayal in the Making of North Korea.

Research interests

Korean labour history and gender studies; history of Korean to English literary translation; Korean kisaeng and the early modern sex labour industry; the Red Decade in colonial Korea.

Key publications

• Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrialising Korea, Berkeley, University of California Press, in press.
• 2012.The Courtesan’s Journal: Kisaeng and the sex labour market in colonial Korea ,Intersections, Vol 30.
• 2011. ‘Girl-Love and Suicide: Re-reading Shin Kyông-suk’s The Solitary Room’, Comparative Korean Literary Studies Vol 19 (3).
• 2009. (ed.) with Elyssa Faison, Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class, London, Routledge.
• 2009. ‘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. (ed.) with Hwasook Nam, Narratives of Working-Class Women in South Korea, special edition of Korean Studies Review, December 2009
• 2006. ‘Tales of Seduction: factory girls in Korean proletarian literature’, positions: east asia cultures critique, 14:2, Fall 2006, Duke University Press.
• 2005. ‘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).

Literary translations

• "Darkness" by Kang Kyông-ae (1937), in J. Kim, T. Hughes, J. Lee and S. Lee (eds.) Rat-Fire and Other Stories: An Anthology of Korean Proletarian Literature, Cornell East Asia Series, forthcoming.