Historian Amy Stanley awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship

Amy Stanley, the Wayne V. Jones II Research Professor of History at Northwestern, is being recognized with a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation aims to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” This year, after a rigorous application and peer review process, 171 scientists, writers, scholars, and artists across 48 fields were selected from an applicant pool 2,500 strong for “prior achievement and exceptional promise.” The Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates.

Stanley is a social historian of early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in global history, women’s and gender history, and narrative. Her 2022 book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Stanley is also the director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern.

Stanley will use her Guggenheim Fellowship in East Asian Studies to support the research and writing of a new social history of World War II in Asia. Her book will tell the story of people who found themselves on the battlefield in Burma, including a Japanese-American intelligence officer, a Korean “comfort woman,” a British anthropologist, a Burmese feminist and an Indian independence activist, examining how their experiences shaped the post-imperial world.

“Like Emerson, I believe that fullness in life comes from following our calling. The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

Edward Hirsch, President, Guggenheim Foundation, 1985 Fellow in Poetry

Read the full story on Northwestern Now.