Amy Stanley

Amy Stanley is Professor of History at Northwestern University. Primarily a historian of Japan, she has 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. Her Guggenheim project, “Burmese Sunset,” is a new social history of World War II on the Asian continent. It focuses on men and women who went to the battlefield as combatants, witnesses, and trafficked laborers, and whose testimony about their experience shaped the post-colonial and post-imperial nations that emerged from the cataclysm.