Scott O’Bryan is an affiliate member of the Institute for International Strategy, School of Liberal International Affairs at Waseda University Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include the history of social science, consumption and mass consumer culture, environmental history, urban history, and peace history. O’Bryan received his M.A from Yale University in 1992 and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2002.

He has written about twentieth-century forms of statistical knowledge within political-economics and about the rise of the idea of limits in economic and environmental thought. O'Bryan is now completing a book manuscript titled A Fetish for Growth: National Exceptionalism and Economic Knowledge in Post-Imperial Japan, 1945-1975  that looks at a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and practiced their socio-economic policies. His next major project, Dreams of the Archipelago, traces a history of Japan as both an icon of Cold War developmentalism and as the place in the closing decades of the century in which new fears of a more limited human future were perhaps most acutely expressed.