Haboush was the King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University when she died in New York City in 2011.
[1][2] Haboush attended Ewha Womans University and studied English literature in Seoul.
Haboush obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 1978 under Professor Gari Ledyard.
[3] Her important writings include the books The Confucian Kingship in Korea, the paperback edition of her 1988 monograph, A Heritage of Kings: One Man's Monarchy in the Confucian World on the reign of King Yeongjo of Joseon of the Joseon dynasty, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea, a translation of the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng in which Lady Hyegyŏng details the events leading to the execution of Crown Prince Sado.
[2] In the summary by her editor (and husband) William Haboush in 2016, she interpreted the decisive impact on Korea of its victories against the Japanese and Manchu invaders: Out of this great war at the end of the 16th century and the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636–1637, Koreans emerged with a discernible sense of themselves as a distinct ethnie united by birth, language, and belief forged by this immense clash of the three great powers of East Asia....Korea arrived at the brink of the seventeenth century as a nation.