Professor Matt Matsuda teaches Modern European and Asia/ Pacific global-comparative histories in the Rutgers-New Brunswick History Department, where he has been since 1993.
He is the author of The Memory of the Modern (1996), Empire of Love (2003), Pacific Worlds (2012), A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories (2020), and many articles, and is an editor for the Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean (2022). He is also founding editor of the Palgrave Studies in Pacific Histories, currently, 7 volumes ranging over histories of anthropology, science, Oceanian empire, and early modern commodity trading. His next book will be Genetic Drift: Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific (2023).
From 2015-2021 he was the founding Academic Dean/ Professor in Residence at the Honors College-New Brunswick, developing an interdisciplinary academic experience and social innovation curricula for a scholarly community.
He has also previously served as the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program (2012-15) and as College Avenue Campus Dean, as well as a departmental undergraduate vice-chair. Dr. Matsuda took over the directorship of the Lloyd C. Gardner Fellowship Program in 2022.
When possible, he and his wife, documentary filmmaker Lee Quinby, live at the beach in Rockaway, NY. His family is from Japan, Hawai‘i and California, and he lived in in Paris for three years while doing research work for his UCLA Ph.D. He is also a guitarist and songwriter with a 1985 underground album, and still plays with geezer bands.
