For a short bio of Professor Mote, see https://eas.princeton.edu/people/frederick-mote.

Lecture abstract:

The story of the swordsmith couple Ganjiang 干將 and Moye 莫耶 from the late Spring and Autumn (fifth-century BCE) is so enduring that school children in the Chinese-speaking world can still recite its plot: Charged by the king to cast the deadliest sword, the couple became desperate when the metal would neither melt nor flow. They completed their task only when Moye leaped into the furnace and immolated herself. In this talk, we revisit this classic lore of the sacrificial wife by putting three mediums into conversation: Material remains of swords from late Spring and Autumn Wu-Yue tombs; the textual tradition of the lore from the first-century Wu Yue chunqiu 吳越春秋 to the modern writer Lu Xun’s short story Zhujian 鑄劍 (Meijian chi 眉間尺); and the animation work of Chinese-American artist Hong HUO 霍弘 featuring Moye as the protagonist, Melt 鎔. In so doing, we examine the gendered politics of Moye’s metamorphosis through the ages while taking stock of the power of emotions as an agent of historical change.

A native of Hong Kong, Dorothy Ko is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is a cultural historian of early modern China whose research focuses on gender, technology, material culture, and sustainability. Her recent book, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, is a finalist of the Morey Prize of the College Art Association. An earlier book, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association. She is an elected member of the Academia Sinica and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.