Amy Stanley
Amy Stanley is an historian and author whose book Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, published in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, where she teaches Japanese history and the history of gender and sexuality in Asia.
Stanley earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and has been recognized as a leading scholar of early modern and modern Japan. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (2012), examined the social and economic history of prostitution in Edo-period Japan with meticulous archival depth.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City reconstructs the life of Tsuneno, a Buddhist priest’s daughter from a remote Japanese village who left a series of failed marriages to make her way alone to Edo — the city that would become Tokyo — in the 1830s. Drawing on an extraordinary archive of family letters, Stanley brings Tsuneno to vivid life and uses her story to illuminate the textures of daily life in the shogun’s capital on the eve of Japan’s encounter with Western modernity. The narrative reads more like a novel than a conventional history, and it has been praised for both its scholarly rigor and its literary grace.
Stanley has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Japan Foundation, and the Newberry Library. Her work represents the best of the new microhistorical approach to Asian history, and she continues to research and write at Northwestern, where she is a highly regarded teacher and mentor.
