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History Program
Staff profiles
Dr Ruth Ford
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Senior Lecturer
Room: Arts Building 2.18
Tel: (61 3) 5444 7981
Fax: (61 3)
5444 7970
Email: r.ford@latrobe.edu.au
Qualifications: BAppSci RMIT, BA La Trobe, PhD La Trobe |
Ruth Ford joined the History Program in 2001 as a Lecturer. Her research interests include gender history, rural and regional history, labour history, oral history and memory, the history of sexuality and twentieth-century Australia history. Her research has focussed on gender, identity and agency, women’s rural labour, landscape and place; whiteness and settler colony identities, urban and rural modernity, and lesbian and queer sexual identities in twentieth-century Australia.
Dr Ford is currently conducting a research project on Women working on the land: gender, identity and rural labour in south-eastern Australia, 1901-1945. This ARC Discovery grant (‘Working the land: Women's rural labour and the making of a Nation, Australia, 1901-1945’) analyses the personal experiences and identities of rural women in south-eastern Australia. It seeks new ways of conceptualising the relationship between work on the land, country and city, and gender, race and Australian identity during times of sweeping change. As part of this project, Ruth is writing a monograph on women’s letters to the rural press from World War 1 to World War 2.
Ruth is also completing a monograph Secret Lives: Passionate friends and lesbian love in Australia 1920s-1950s, based on her PhD thesis ‘Contested Desires: narratives of passionate friends, married masqueraders and lesbian love in Australia, 1918-1945'.
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Dr Ford has been published extensively in gender history, rural history and the history of sexuality. Selected chapters and articles include:
- ‘Filthy, obscene and mad’: Engendering “homophobia” in Australia, 1940s-1960s’, in Shirleene Robinson, ed., Homophobia:An Australian History, Federation Press, 2008.
- 'Prove first you're a male': A farmhand's claim for wages in 1929 Australia', Labour History, No 90, May 2006, pp. 1-21‘
- “They give up domestic help and go out harvesting”; Women fruit-pickers and fruit-packers in 1912 Australia ', History Australia, vol.2, no.2, 2004, pp.07.1-07.12.
- ‘Rural Women workers struggling for wage justice through the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in pre-World War 1 Australia’ in Transforming Labour: proceedings of the Eight National Labour History Conference, eds., Bradley Bowden and John Kellet, Brisbane Labour History Association, Brisbane, 2003, pp.133-141.
- ‘'Sexuality and Madness: Regulating women's gender ‘deviance' through the Asylum', in Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, eds., Madness in Australia: History, Heritage and the Asylum, UQP/API, 2003, pp.109-120.
- ‘“The man-woman murderer”: sex fraud, sexual inversion and the unmentionable article in 1920s Australia ', Gender and History, vol.12, no.1, April 2000, pp.158-196.
- ‘Speculating on scrapbooks, sex and desire: issues in lesbian history', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 27, no.106, April 1996, pp.11-26.
- 'Lesbians and loose women: female sexuality and the women's services during World War 2', in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., Gender and War, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.81-104.
- 'Lady friends and sexual deviationists: lesbians and the law in Australia , 1920s - 1950s' in Diane Kirkby, ed., Sex, Power and Justice: historical perspectives on the law in Australia, 1788-1990, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp.33-49.
- 'They "were wed, and merrily rang the bells": Gender-crossing and same-sex marriage in Australia, 1900-1940' in Graham Willet and David Phillips, eds., Australian Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 2000, pp.41-66.
- ‘Disciplined, punished and resisting bodies: lesbian women and the Australian armed services, 1950s-60s', Lilith: a Feminist History Journal, no. 9, Autumn, 1996, pp.53-77.
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I welcome inquiries from students interested in pursuing postgraduate research in the areas of gender history, rural and regional history, labour history, oral history and memory, the history of sexuality and twentieth-century Australia history. Although based on the Bendigo campus, I am on the Bundoora campus regularly and able to supervise Bundoora post-graduate students.
Since appointment at La Trobe, Ruth Ford has been successful in obtaining 1 grant from the Australian Research Council and 6 internal grants. They have funded research on women’s rural labour, trade unions and rural women workers, female fruitpickers and equal pay, and photographic representations of rural women’s work, Ruth has one funded research project currently underway:
Working the land: Women's rural labour and the making of a Nation, Australia, 1901-1945 (Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2006-9)
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