Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 76
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-4327 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: adstanle@uchicago.edu
On Leave: 2009-2010

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. Current interests extend to visual culture.

She has received various fellowships and awards, including a University of Chicago Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching in 2009 and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2005.

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)

"When We Were Young" in Wayne F. Miller: Photographs 1942â€“1958, ed. Stephen Daiter(Powerhouse Books, 2008)

"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.

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Amy Dru Stanley

Associate Professor of History
Ph.D. Yale University 1990