• Regions: China; Eurasia; Europe; Iberia; Japan; Low Countries
• Times: 16th to 18th centuries
• Themes: Cultural History; History of the Book; History of Religion; History of Science; Intellectual History

Daniel Said Monteiro received his Ph.D. in East Asian Humanities at Université Paris Cité (University of Paris) in September 2023. Before coming to the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow, he spent four years as an international researcher of the Historical Institute at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on global networks of knowledge circulation in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on intersecting cosmological views in Japan and East Asia.

His dissertation, “Monitored Connections: Transnational Nagasaki and the Circulation of Hybridized Cosmologies in Early Modern Japan (1630–1720),” counters the conventional understanding that Tokugawa Japan’s intellectual landscape was isolated from the rest of the world. It argues instead that Tokugawa scholars engaged with a wide range of cross-border knowledge systems — from late Ming literati and Jesuit missionaries to Chinese, Iberian, and Dutch seafarers — particularly through connections established via the heavily regulated port of Nagasaki. By centering on the role of censors as book curators and local interpreters as cultural mediators in the city, Said Monteiro shows how hybridized forms of cosmological thought shaped the local scholarship of Nagasaki and had long-lasting consequences for the development of novel epistemologies throughout early modern Japan.