Originally from Brazil and trained in the United States, France, and Japan, Daniel Said Monteiro is a cultural historian of East Asia with a focus on transnational flows of knowledge in early modern Japan. In his research and teaching, he explores how discourses on belief, rationality, civilization, and culture are formed in a range of historical contexts. His combined visual and textual strategies challenge preconceived dichotomies of science vs. religion, East vs. West, and premodern vs. modern mindsets. In his current book project, he explores the scholarly world of Nagasaki in Tokugawa Japan, as this strategic port city connected the archipelago to the Eurasian continent and became a nexus for circulating cross-border knowledge under shogunal surveillance. Before coming to Trinity, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and spent four years as a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo. At Trinity, he teaches courses on Japanese civilization and cultural histories of East Asia.

Publications:

• “Where Barbarian Ships Swarm in from Overseas: An Overview of the Scholarship of Early Modern Nagasaki.” Hikaku nihongaku kyoiku kenkyu bumon kenkyu nenpo 18 (2022): 157-165.
• “Nishikawa Joken (1648-1724) no shomotsu kara miru kinsei Nagasaki no haiburiddo kosumoroji: wakan’yo no tenmon chirigakuteki chishiki no konsei” [Hybrid Cosmologies in Early Modern Nagasaki as Seen through the Works of Nishikawa Joken (1648-1724): Combining Astronomical and Geographical Knowledge from Japan, China, and Europe]. Kamizono 25 (2022): 192-196.
• “Celestial Sciences in the Works of Nishikawa Joken (1648-1724).” Historia Scientiarum 29, no. 1 (2019): 112-35.

Recent Presentations:

• “Learning from the Continent: Vernacularizing Chinese and Chinese Vernaculars in Mid-Tokugawa Japan,” Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Seattle, March 14-17, 2024.
• “Productive Censorship? Christianity, Confucian Orthodoxy, and the Cross-Border Cosmologies of Early Modern Nagasaki,” Japan Forum lecture series, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, December 8, 2023.
• “Myriad Lands on a Spherical Earth: Adopting and Adapting Jesuit Cosmologies in Early Modern Nagasaki,” Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, March 16-19, 2023.
• “Cultural Mediators: Nagasaki Scholar-Interpreters in the Wake of the Ming-Qing Transition,” Early Modern Kyushu: A Regional Crossroads of Knowledge, Trade, and Production Workshop, Université Paris Cité, September 9-10, 2022.
• “Rationalizing Aberrations and Anomalies in Mid-Edo Nagasaki,” European Association for Japanese Studies, August 24-28, 2021.
• “Natural Philosophy and the Popularization of Knowledge in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century Japan,” International Convention of Asia Scholars, Leiden University, July 16-19, 2019.

• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, 2023-2024
• Research Fellowship, Japan Foundation, 2019-2020
• Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action INSPIRE Doctoral Fellowship, Université Paris Cité, 2016-2019
• Research Award, Shoyu Club of Japan, 2017-2018
• Fieldwork Grant, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2016    
• International Master’s Excellence Award, Université Paris Cité, 2015-2016