Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 76
Chicago, IL 60637
Fax: (773) 702-7550
(773) 702-4327
Email: adstanle@uchicago.edu
On Leave: 2008-2009
FIELD SPECIALTIES
United States - Nineteenth Century, Intellectual and Cultural, Political Economy, Gender, Legal
BIOGRAPHY
Amy Dru Stanley's research and teaching focus on U.S. history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the history of capitalism, slavery and emancipation, and the historical experience of moral problems. Methodologically, she works at the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history.
She has received various fellowships and awards, including a University of Chicago Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2005.
Interested in addressing a broader public, she has given lectures at the Whitney Museum of American Art and taught seminars for high school teachers at the Newberry Library and written for the Nation and the New York Times.
Her current projects include studies of the problem of desire in the age of slavery and emancipation, commodity exchange across the Mason-Dixon Line, and the Thirteenth Amendment and gender.
Projects of graduate students with whom she works include democracy, risk and freedom, religion and consumer culture, feminism, Irish nationalism, working-class leisure, temperance politics, the mental health sciences, and the New Woman.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
The Voluntary Principle (for lack of a better title) (forthcoming, Harvard University Press)
From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
From Bondage to Contract has received the following prizes:
- Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, 1999 (For the best first book in U.S. History, awarded by the Organization of American Historians)
- Morris D. Forkosch Award, 1999 (For the best book in intellectual history)
- Avery O. Craven Award, 1999 (For the best book on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, awarded by the Organization of American Historians)
- Frederick Douglass Prize, 1999 - Honorable Mention (For the best book on the history of slavery)
"The Badges of Woman's Slavery," (forthcoming in A. Tsesis, ed., Promises of Liberty, Columbia University Press)
"Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004).
"Dominion and Dependence in the Law of Freedom and Slavery," Law & Social Inquiry (2003)
"Marriage, Property, and Ideals of Class," in Blackwell's Companion to American Women's History, ed. Nancy Hewitt (Blackwell Press, 2002).
"The Right to Possess All the Faculties that God has Given: Possessive Individualism, Slave Women, and Abolitionist Thought," in Moral Problems in American Life, ed., Lewis Perry and Karen Halttunnen (Cornell University Press, 1999).
"Home Life and the Morality of the Marketplace: Slavery and Freedom,Women and Men," in The Market Revolution in America, ed., Melvyn Stokes (University of Virginia Press, 1996).
"Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America," Journal of American History, 78 (March 1992), 1265-93.
"Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation," Journal of American History, 75 (Sept. 1988), 471-500.