I am a historian of science and modern East Asia, currently completing a PhD at the University of Zurich. I am also a visiting research fellow at Waseda University until September 2026.

My dissertation began with a fairly simple problem. Japanese science, whether in agriculture or elsewhere, is usually treated as a Western import: new knowledge arrived, experts learned it, and the state put it to work. But the people who built agricultural schools, experiment stations, and colonial settlements did not think they were starting from scratch. They used modern science to respond to much older arguments about good government, the order of knowledge, and the proper relation between rulers and cultivators.

A Confucian Science follows this unlikely project from Hokkaido to colonial Taiwan and into the postwar period. It is a history of science and empire, but also of the rough edges of the circulation of ideas from the West to Japan, conflicts within society about different answers to shared problems, and, in particular, the creation of a technocratic class of agricultural experts who set the terms of these debates.

My publications, CV, and a longer description of the project are available on this site. I can be reached at scott.ma@uzh.ch.