Lecture: "Taste, Share, and Cook: A Comparative Study on Meanings of Food in Ming-Qing Women's Poetry"

“Taste, Share, and Cook: A Comparative Study on Meanings of Food in Ming-Qing Women’s Poetry” is the title of the next lecture organized by the Confiucus Institute at the University of Padova with the support of Guangzhou University and of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DiSLL) at the University of Padova.

The appointment is on January 28th, 2025 at 17.00 in the Library Meeting Room of Beato Pellegrino Complex (via Beato Pellegrino 28, 35137 Padova).

The lecture will be in English.

The speaker is Prof. Zhong Bili, Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College in Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. 

Abstract: This lecture attempts to demonstrate the intimate and multifarious relationships between food and Ming-Qing female poets. In their poetry, food serves as a platform for the presentation of their aesthetic taste, as a connection of their feminine social internet, and as a medium of their communication with a broader world constructed by male literati, family honor, and parenthood. Particularly, their writings on food display a clear consciousness of sexuality which is specifically conveyed by the hands-on value (labor and sweat) of women during their preparing and cooking of food. It is seen that Ming-Qing women poets produce a kind of gustative writing that combines aesthetic configuration and mundane practice, which is greatly different from the writings of food of the Italian Cinquecento women poets. The lecture will try to investigate what causes such differences from the perspective of women’s domestic dedication.

Prof. Zhong Bili received a PhD degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DiSLL) at the University of Padova in 2019, and she had a 3-year Postdoc position at the Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China (2019-2022). Since May 2023, she has been working as an Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College at the same university. Her current research interests include Dante Studies, Studies of Renaissance Literature and Comparative Studies of Chinese-Italian Literature.