Jun Matsuda is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at Aoyama Gakuin University. He specializes in Japanese and Okinawan literature, history of ideas, and postcolonial studies. In recent years, his research has also taken up film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and queer theory.

He holds a PhD (2020) and MA (2013) from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan, and BA (2011) from the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan.

His dissertation was on the literature, history of ideas, and activism of resistance in U.S.-occupied Okinawa (1945-1972). He is currently developing and expanding this theme, critically historicizing the expansion of U.S. imperial formation and the accompanying stationing of its troops around the world since the 19th century, and elucidating how they have governed modern Okinawa and how the governed have resisted this domination in terms of "colonial governmentality”.

Dr. Matsuda’s research develops an interdisciplinary methodology while questioning the conventional research framework of area studies, recognizing that a comprehensive examination of ideas, movements, and artistic works is essential for depicting the close relationship between governance and resistance in modern and contemporary Okinawa. His work also critically rethinks the essentialist and depoliticized representations of Okinawa in traditional area studies as a constitutive category of global biopolitics and questions the limits of Japanese-speaking postcolonial discourse and its failure to critique the domestic binary perspective of Japan and Okinawa, which has foregrounded U.S. hegemonic geostrategy.