I was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. At 15, I left Syracuse to go to Lünen, West Germany on a Congress-Bundestag scholarship. At 16, I started as a freshman at the State University of New York at Binghamton, transferring after a year to study Kant and Hegel at the University of Tübingen in West Germany. At 18, I returned to the State University of New York, this time at the Stony Brook campus, where I graduated with a BA in Philosophy in 1990. I received my PhD in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT in 1995.

My father, Manfred Stanley, was a German Jew born in Berlin in 1932; he came as a refugee to the United States from Germany in August, 1939. My father spent most of his life as a professor in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University, publishing many papers and one book, The Technological Conscience: Survival and Dignity in an Age of Expertise (University of Chicago Press, 1978). My mother is a Polish Jew from Chelm, born in 1940 and raised in the Siberian Gulag. She was repatriated back to Poland in 1945, and then arrived as a refugee in the United States in 1948. She and her sister are the only survivors of their generation from the maternal side of my family; my great-grandmother, seven of her children, and all of their children were murdered in Sobibor concentration camp (I have written about my parents here.) My step-mother, Mary Stanley, is a political theorist who retrained and is now working as an artist. My brother, Marcus Stanley, is the Director of Studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; before that he was the Policy Director at Americans for Financial Reform.

My grandmother Ilse Stanley was also an actor. She is author of the book, The Unforgotten (Beacon Press, 1957), one of the first memoirs of the Holocaust, and is featured on the American show, This is Your Life in 1955.

Cover photo: Yurii Stefanyak, Ukrainer