core faculty

Ruth Barraclough

Ruth Barraclough

Korea Foundation Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of History; Director, Center for Korean Research

Office: 913 IAB
Email: rb3029@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA (Honours) University of Queensland
PhD Australian National University

Classes Taught

HIST UN2851 Making Modern Korea
HIST GU4872 North Korean History, Culture and Politics

Research Interests

Ruth Barraclough is an historian of modern Korea with a focus on labor, gender, and literature.

Her first book, Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea, 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 was named one of the top ten books of 2017.

In addition to academic work, Dr. 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, Dr. Barraclough is the new Faculty Director of the Dual Degree Masters in International and World History with LSE and from January 2025 is the Director of the Center for Korean Research at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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

Christina Yi

Christina Yi

Associate Professor of Japanese Literature

Office: 408 Kent Hall
Email: csy2103@columbia.edu

Educational Background:

BA: University of Virginia (’05)
MA: Columbia University (’09)
PhD: Columbia University (’13)

Classes Taught:

AHUM UN3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008 Readings in Classical Japanese
JPNS GR9020 Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests:

Christina Yi is a scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with a research focus on issues of postcoloniality, genre and narrative theory, language politics, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018), investigated how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. The research and writing of this project was funded through generous grants from the Northeast Asia Council of AAS, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), among others. Her current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers. This project was funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and Japan Foundation fellowship. Professor Yi is also an active translator, and was a recipient of the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize for her translation of Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus” (Tenma).

Selected Publications:

Sole author: Imperial Testaments: Repatriation Narratives in Modern Japan (advance contract at Columbia University Press)

Co-editor: Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asia Empire (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023)

Translator: Kim Sŏkpŏm, Death of a Crow (Karasu no shi; Seoul Selection, 2022)

Co-editor: “Zainichi Literature and Film” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019)

Sole author: Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018)

Madeleine Zelin

Madeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies

Office: 611 Kent Hall

Phone: (212) 854-2592 [I do not use my phone, please email]Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Selected Classes Taught

HSEA GU4891 Law in Chinese HIstory
HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History
HSEA G8861 Industrial Revolutions

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy

Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing China (University of California, 1984)