Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and scholar Dr. Amy Stanley will deliver Illinois State University’s Robert G. Bone Distinguished Lecture. Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University, will present Stranger in the Shogun’s City: Modern History from the Archive to the Page at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 13, in the Brown Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public.
Stanley’s most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, 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.
The Wayne V. Jones Research Professor of History at Northwestern, Stanley is primarily a social historian of early modern and modern Japan. She has special interests in global history, women’s and gender history, and narrative. The talk will focus on Stanley’s research for her most recent book on an 18th-century woman named Tsuneno, who ran away from her home in the Japanese snow country, determined to find a new life in the city of Edo (now Tokyo).
“This talk draws from my experience writing about Tsuneno’s life to consider problems of narration, methodology, and silence,” said Stanley, who is also the director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. “Where do you turn when you don’t know exactly what happened? How do you write a compelling narrative when you’re faced with frustrating gaps? How do you know what your sources aren’t telling you, and make peace with that?”
Stanley is also the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, as well as articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. She received a Ph.D. in east Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This lecture is sponsored by Illinois State’s Department of History.
For additional information, or for those who need special accommodations to attend this event, contact Trish Gudeman at pmgudem@ilstu.edu.
