People
Amy Stanley
Early Modern Japan
Office: Harris Hall #203
Phone: 847-467-6722
E-mail: a-stanley
northwestern.edu
Amy Stanley (Ph.D. Harvard, 2007) specializes in the history of early modern and modern Japan, with a particular interest in how common people contributed to Japan’s economic, political, and social transformation in the mid-nineteenth century. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012), explained how the growing business of selling sex reconfigured women’s places in the household, the marketplace, and the Tokugawa state. Professor Stanley has also written articles on education for geisha in the 1870’s and early modern peasants’ practices of settling adultery cases. Her new project, a social history of Kyoto during the tumultuous years surrounding the Meiji restoration, takes up the question of how common people outside the capital shaped Japanese modernity. A recipient of the WCAS Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2012, she offers lecture courses on pre-20th century Japan and seminars on various aspects of women’s/gender history, Asian history, and archival research.
