Dorothy Ko

Professor of History, Barnard College

History of women, gender, and material cultures in early modern China

Professor Ko's research interest is the everyday lives of women in China --along with the domestic objects they made by hand--as a significant part of country's cultural, economic and political development. She works at the intersections of anthropology, history, and women's studies.

Professor Ko has worked to establish the parameters of women's and cultural history. In her first monograph, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1994), she retrieved the social and emotional lives of women from the poetry they wrote. In her book Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (University of California Press, 2001), she used material culture—embroidered slippers—to reconstruct women's lives. A monograph, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (University of California Press, 2005), was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women's history and/or feminist theory in that year.

Cinderella Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, published in 2005, shattered the popular conception of footbinding as a tool to oppress women and demonstrated that it was instead a source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power. It won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association.

Recently, she has been turning her attention to the skills of women's artisans such as embroiderers, stone carvers, and ceramic artists. Her research during spring semester, 2004, as a senior fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center's Institute for International Research in Nanjing, focused on the importance of ancient art of silk-weaving for a study of the dress-making tradition and domestic work culture in China's silk industry region. More recently, as a fellow at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, in spring 2007, she researched ancient swordsmith legends for insights into the relations between bodily investments and transformation of matter.

Ko has received a number of fellowships and awards. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000–2002) and an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study (2000–2001) for her current research on textiles, fashion, and women's work. She served as guest curator for an exhibition, "Shoes in the Lives of Women in Late Imperial China," at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

At Barnard and Columbia, Professor Ko teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on cultural history, gender, and writing in China and Korea; visual and material cultures in China; and history of the body in East Asia. Before joining the Barnard faculty, Professor Ko taught at Rutgers University.

Professor Ko received her BA in 1978 and her PhD in 1989 from Stanford University. She joined the Barnard faculty in 2001.

Email: dk2031@columbia.edu