Staff profile

Dr Ruth Ford

Senior Lecturer

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Historical and European Studies

Arts Building 2.18, Bendigo

 

Qualifications

BAppSci (RMIT), BA (La Trobe), PhD (La Trobe).

Area of study

History
Australian Studies

Brief Profile

Ruth Ford joined the History Program in 2001 as a Lecturer. 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.

Research interests

Australian History

- Women’s rural labour

Gender, Culture, Sexuality

- Gender, identity and agency

- Lesbian and queer sexual identities in twentieth-century Australia.

Teaching Units

HIS2/3DA - Dangerous Attractions. HIS2/3GRH - Gender Relations in Australian History. HIS2/3RTP - Remembering the Past: Oral History and Memory. HIS2/3SCS - Sex, Crime and Scandal.

Recent Publications

Ford, R 2010, ‘The Wattles are in Bloom. Crops are looking wonderfully well: Settler women in the Victorian Mallee, 1920s-1930s’, in Outside Country: a History of inland Australia, ed. Alan Mayne. Adelaide: Wakefield Press.

 

Ford, R 2008, ‘Filthy, Obscene and Mad: Engendering homophobia in Australia, 1940s-1960s’, in Homophobia: An Australian History, ed. Shirleene Robinson. Sydney: Federation Press.

 

Ford, R 2006, 'Prove First you're a male: A farmhand's claim for wages in 1929 Australia’. Labour History. 90: 1-21.

 

Ford, R 2004, ‘They Give Up Domestic Help and Go Out Harvesting: Women fruit-pickers and fruit-packers in 1912 Australia’. History Australia. 2(2): 1-12.

 

Ford, R 2003, ‘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, ed. B Bowden & J Kellet. Brisbane: Brisbane Labour History Association.

 

Ford, R 2003, ‘Sexuality and Madness: Regulating women's gender ‘deviance’ through the Asylum’,in Madness in Australia: History, Heritage and the Asylum, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

 

Ford, R 2000, ‘They were wed, and merrily rang the bells: Gender-crossing and same-sex marriage in Australia, 1900-1940’, in Australian Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, ed. G Willet & D Phillips. Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research.

 

Ford, R 2000, ‘The man-woman murderer: sex fraud, sexual inversion and the unmentionable article in 1920s Australia’. Gender and History. 12(1): 158-196.

 

Ford, R 1996, ‘Speculating on scrapbooks, sex and desire: issues in lesbian history’. Australian Historical Studies. 27(106): 11-26.

 

Ford, R 1996, ‘Disciplined, punished and resisting bodies: lesbian women and the Australian armed services, 1950s-60s’. Lilith: a Feminist History Journal. 9: 53-77.