Amy Stanley
· Orrington Lunt Professor of History, and Director of Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical StudiesNorthwestern University · History
Active 1920–2025
About
Amy Stanley is the Orrington Lunt Professor of History and Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2007. Her research focuses on early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative. Stanley's most recent book, 'Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World,' published by Scribner in 2020, has received significant recognition, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography and the 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' and has published articles in prominent journals such as the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. Her scholarly work explores themes related to domestic and global history, gender, and sexuality in Japan, and she is currently working on a narrative history of Japan. Stanley has held fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Psychoanalysis
- Applied psychology
- History
Selected publications
Gendering the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
The American Historical Review · 2025-06-01
article1st authorCorrespondingA Feminist Companion to Research Methods in Psychology
Psychology of Women and Equalities Section Review · 2023 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Psychology
- Sociology
Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022
- Political Science
- History
- Political Science
2021-08-19
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAt the beginning of the Tokugawa era, cities were male-dominated spaces. The new castle towns were garrisons that hosted massive standing armies, and relatively few samurai had brought wives and children along when they were relocated from the countryside. Purveyors to the shogun and the daimyo were invited to move to castle towns along with their entire households. In the late seventeenth century, as the commoner populations of the great cities exploded, the structure of large mercantile households ensured that men still vastly outnumbered women. A combination of anecdotal evidence and demographic data gleaned from individual neighborhoods suggests that many maidservants in the great cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto came from "demographic basins" in the surrounding countryside. As the great cities became more demographically balanced, female-majority cities and towns began to emerge in the countryside. The population of Osaka City is also predominantly female, with a sex ratio of 0.94.
2019-12-31
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding7. Fashioning the Family: A Temple, a Daughter, and a Wardrobe
2019-12-31 · 1 citations
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingFashioning the Family: A Temple, a Daughter, and a Wardrobe
2019-09-17 · 2 citations
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter examines the meaning of family in nineteenth-century Japan by focusing on a rural temple family’s argument over who owned a rebellious daughter’s wardrobe. Unlike other household possessions, clothing was portable and visible outside the home, where it could contribute to or detract from the family’s reputation. Clothing was also typically produced, purchased, repaired, and managed by women. As a result, struggles over clothing were not only about tangible property, they were also about women’s household roles, their access to cash and credit, and their contributions to the family’s reputation. This chapter argues that even within the same household, individuals’ definitions of the family and its responsibilities could be irreconcilable, making a unified ideal of “the family” untenable.
2019-07-01 · 23 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingThis book traces the social history of early modern Japan’s sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.
Part One. Regulation and the Logic of the Household
2019-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Journal of Asian Studies · 2016-02-01
article1st authorCorrespondingMabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950. By Fabian Franz Drixler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii, 417 pp. ISBN 9780520272439 (cloth). - Volume 75 Issue 1
Frequent coauthors
- 9 shared
Stacie Kent
- 9 shared
Weiting Guo
- 9 shared
John Cheng
University of Chicago
- 9 shared
Jeff Watt
University of Chicago
- 9 shared
Bean Gepner
Wesleyan University
- 9 shared
Mary Thank
British Library
- 9 shared
Michael Szönyi
Harvard University Press
- 9 shared
Darren Grem
Wesleyan University
Labs
Awards & honors
- National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography
- PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography
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