DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Asian History; Global History

Thematic Field(s):  Urban History; Gender and Sexuality History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Early modern and modern Japan

Biography

Amy Stanley (Ph.D., Harvard, 2007) is a social historian of early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative. Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Biography and PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She is also the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (UC Press 2012), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Publications

• Stranger in the Shogun's City (Scribner, 2020)
• “Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600-1900” The American Historical Review Vol. 121, No. 2 (April 2016): 437-460.
• “Enlightenment Geisha: The Sex Trade, Education, and Feminine Ideals in Early Meiji Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72 no. 3 (2013). 
• Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012).
• “Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation in Tokugawa Japan” The Journal of Japanese Studies 33 no. 2 (2007). 

Teaching Interests

Professor Stanley teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japan before the twentieth century, early modern global history, and women's/gender history. She accepts graduate students working on Edo and Meiji Japan. 

Recent Awards and Honors

• NEH Faculty Fellowship, 2015-16.
• WCAS Distinguished Teaching Award. 2012.