Anne Sokolsky received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature with a sub-specialty in Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Her book From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko from 1936–1938 (Brill, 2015) is about one of Japan’s early modern feminist writers who spent two decades living in North America in the 1920s and 1930s. Sokolsky’s research on Tamura has appeared in scholarly journals published in the United States and Japan. Other research projects include the translation of Shigemitsu Mamoru’s Sugamo prison diary, the depiction of the 1945 International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) in literature and film, and the literary production and reception of women’s writing in Taiwan during Japan’s rule of the country from 1895-1945. Sokolsky is also working on a biography of her grandfather, who was a journalist in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century. Her research has appeared in The U.S. Japan-Women’s Journal, The Japanese Studies Association Journal, and Asian Theatre Journal, and has been funded by Fulbright, the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council, and Taiwan’s Ministry of Education.

Sokolsky is Professor Emerita from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was chair and professor in the Comparative Literature Department. In the Spring of 2022, she was the Taiwan Chair and Professorial Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. She currently teaches for the East Asian Studies Program at Denison University.

In addition to living in Japan for eight years, she spent two years in Morocco, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. While in Morocco, she learned Moroccan Arabic and then continued studying Arabic at Harvard University, where she received a M.Ed. in International Education and Development.

In 2021, she received Ohio Wesleyan University’s Welch Award for Scholarly Achievement. She is also the literary editor for the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature.