A scholar of statebuilding, Reo Matsuzaki's research examines the institutional foundations of the modern state and the performative practices that sustain them.  With expertise in the modern political history of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, he works across the area-studies divide between Northeast and Southeast Asia.

His book in progress, The Façade of Modernity: Veiled Facts and Open Fictions in the Making of Meiji Japan, argues that the modern Japanese state was built as much through the collaborative production of fictions as through the institutions those fictions sustained. The project builds on a series of articles on fictive politics, including “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan” (with Fabian Drixler, Politics & Society 2025), “Fictive Politics” (with Fabian Drixler and Anna Grzymala-Busse, forthcoming in Annual Review of Political Science), and “Simulating Reform: Statistics, Working Consensus, and Stop-and-Frisk Persistence in New York City” (with Jake Loor and Hernán Flom, forthcoming in Politics & Society). 

His first book, Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines (Cornell University Press, 2019), examined the role of societal intermediaries in the construction of modern states through a comparative analysis of Japanese colonization of Taiwan and U.S. colonization of the Philippines. He has since extended this line of research to the legacies of counterinsurgency and wartime occupation, including in “When Counterinsurgent Institutions Persist: Unpacking Local Wartime Legacies” (with Rachel Schwartz, Studies in Comparative International Development 2024). His ongoing projects examine the variation in the survival of Japanese wartime institutions in postwar Southeast Asia and cadastral surveying, legibility, and state involution under U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines.

He received his Ph.D. from MIT and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is an Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Weatherhead Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and at Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies. He serves on the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. 

Fellowships, Awards, and Grants:

• Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence, 2026
• Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award, APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group, 2025
• US-Japan Network for the Future Program, Mansfield Foundation, 2016-2018
• Max Weber Fellowship, European University Institute, 2012 (declined)
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, CDDRL, Stanford University, 2011-2012
• World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship, Smith Richardson Foundation, 2009
• Samuel Flagg Bemis Research Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2008
• Matsushita International Foundation Research Grant, 2008