Dorothy Y. Ko

A native of Hong Kong, Dorothy Ko is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research and publications have helped establish gender as a category of analysis in Chinese history by showing its relevance for studies in visual and material cultures as well as science and technology. Her current work focuses on food security and environmental justice in China.

She is the author of Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, 1994) and Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005), which won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association as the best book of the year in women’s history and/or feminist theory. Another monograph, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early-Qing China (Washington, 2017), was a finalist of the Charles Rufus Morley Book Award, College Art Association.

Ko has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, among others. She was elected Academician of the Academia Sinica in 2018. In 2021-22 Ko served as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the John W. Kluge Center, the Library of Congress.