Before joining MMA, Dr. Said Monteiro taught courses on Japanese and East Asian history and civilizations at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. In his research, he examines how central authorities and local intermediaries mobilized, regulated, and negotiated technical information and cosmological knowledge, notably in the shogunal port city of Nagasaki. His doctoral work was awarded the 2025 Dissertation Prize of the Division of History of Science and Technology in the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DHST-IUHPST) in recognition of its contribution to global perspectives on Japanese intellectual pursuits in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the use of multilingual sources.

Dr. Said Monteiro is currently expanding his book manuscript on the ambivalent role of censorial practices in Tokugawa society, with particular attention to the recurring bans on Christianity and a burgeoning technoscientific culture in centrally administered ports and mines throughout seventeenth-century Japan. By foregrounding the agency of local actors who produced knowledge under close shogunal surveillance, he argues that censors, inspectors, and other officials not only constrained but also, paradoxically, enabled the cross-border circulation of books and ideas across the realm.

Originally from Brazil and trained in North America, Europe, and East Asia, Dr. Said Monteiro completed his PhD at Université Paris Cité in 2023, with extended periods of archival research at the Institute of Oriental Classics, Keio University, and the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo.