Dr. Daniel Said Monteiro joins project MMA as a postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Said Monteiro is a historian of science and technology in the early modern world, focusing on transnational flows of knowledge in Tokugawa Japan. His research examines how central authorities and local intermediaries mobilized, regulated, and negotiated technical information and cosmological knowledge, notably in the shogunal port city of Nagasaki. Dr. Said Monteiro completed his PhD at Université Paris Cité in 2023, and prior to joining the project he 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.
Within the MMA project, he investigates the intersection between mineral and aquatic resources and what it reveals about the nature of statecraft in the first century of the Tokugawa regime’s consolidation. Drawing on Japanese, Chinese, Iberian, and Dutch materials, he explores the emergence of copper as a major shogunal export and how its extraction, transportation, and transformation connected ports and mines within and beyond the archipelago.
Dr. Said Monteiro is currently expanding his book project on the ambivalent role of censorial practices in Tokugawa society, specifically as it related to a burgeoning technoscientific culture in centrally administered ports and mines throughout seventeenth-century Japan.