Amy Stanley is an American historian of early modern Japan. In 2007, Stanley began teaching in the Department of History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese history, global history, and women's/gender history. She is best known for her most recent book ', which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography, and was a finalist for both the Baillie Gifford Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Stanley received her BA from Harvard University in East Asian Studies in 1999 and her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2007. In 2007, she became the Wayne V. Jones II Research Professor in History at Northwestern University.
She has received harassment from Japanese internet right-wing communities (commonly known as netto uyoku ãÂÂãÂÂãÂÂå³翼, or neto uyo ãÂÂãÂÂã¦ã¨ for short) and Japanese and Korean right-wing scholars due to her criticism on how the controversial issue of Korean comfort women of WWII has been written about by academics. Alongside Hannah Shepherd of Cambridge University, Sayaka Chatani of National University of Singapore, David Ambaras of North Carolina State University, and Chelsea Szendi Schieder of Aoyama Gakuin University, Stanley was one of five Japanese Studies scholars who posted a critical rebuttal against J. Mark RamseyerâÂÂs claims in The Asia Pacific Journal entitled âÂÂ'Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War': The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct." As a result Stanley has also stated that she was the subject of âÂÂoblique threats.âÂÂ
StanleyâÂÂs interest in Japan was first sparked when she interacted with Japanese post-doctoral students who worked alongside her father at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Stanley did not start learning Japanese until she began her post-secondary education at Harvard University. Under the guidance of her advisor Harold Bolitho she was encouraged to pursue her research in early modern Japan.
Stanley currently lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband, two sons, and dog. Her hobbies include pottery, reading, and learning about historical figures from the nineteenth-century.
All publication can be accessed through Stanley's CV on the Northwestern University website here.