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Stranger in the Shogun's City: From the Archive to the Page

Event title and speaker name; headshot of the speaker; woodcut illustration of a Japanese woman wearing kimono, walking
Friday, February 04, 2022
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Amy Stanley (History, Northwestern)
APSI Speaker Series

In the early nineteenth century, an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno ran away from home. Defying convention, she made a life for herself in the big city of Edo (now Tokyo) in the decades before the arrival of Commodore Perry and the fall of the shogunate. But as she was an unknown person, finding out what happened to her is a difficult task. This talk focuses on how images and documents in the Japanese archive can be used - carefully - to tell her story.

About the speaker:
Amy Stanley is the Wayne V. Jones Research Professor of History at Northwestern University. Primarily a social historian of early modern and modern Japan, she has special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative. She is 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. 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. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.