Join us via Zoom: http://bit.ly/EACTalks (Zoom ID: 925 5728 2471)
Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a book about the adventures about a Buddhist priest’s daughter, Tsuneno, who ran away from her village in Echigo to make a life for herself in the city of Edo (now Tokyo) in the last decades of the Tokugawa period. This talk is an introduction to the book, but it is primarily about the process of writing. What are the challenges of writing a book about Japanese history for an American audience? How is writing narrative different from other argumentative strategies in history? And what are some useful approaches to writing about unknown people, particularly women?
Abstract: TBA
Bio: Amy Stanley (Ph.D., Harvard, 2007) is a historian of early modern and modern Japan with interests in women’s/gender history and global history. She is the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan (UC Press, 2012) and Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), as well as articles in The Journal of Japanese Studies, The Journal of Asian Studies, and the American Historical Review. 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.
