Degrees:
Ph.D., Univ. of Paris
M.A., Univ. of Paris
B.A., Yale Univ.
Originally from Brazil and trained in North America, Europe, and East Asia, Daniel Said Monteiro is a cultural historian of the early modern world with a focus on transnational flows of knowledge in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). 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, The Shogun’s Eyes: Knowledge, Censorship, and the World of Seventeenth-Century Nagasaki, Said Monteiro explores the central role of censorial practices in Tokugawa society, with a particular focus on the intersection of recurring bans on Christianity and Nagasaki’s scholarly culture. By highlighting the agency of local actors who produced knowledge under strict shogunal surveillance, he argues that, as this strategic port city connected Japan to China, Europe, and the rest of the globe, censors not only constrained but also enabled the cross-border circulation of books and ideas across the archipelago.
Before coming to Trinity, Said Monteiro 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, from the Paleolithic to the present, as well as cultural and intellectual histories of premodern East Asia. |