Daniel K. Gardner specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of premodern China and the environment in China today.

He has written extensively on the Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions in China, including Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction, Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Confucian Tradition, and Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically. His interest in contemporary environmental matters in China has led to his most recent publication, Environmental Pollution in China: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2018). He is now working on a project, “Imagining an ‘Ecological Civilization’: China's Environmental Turn in the 21st Century,” for which he was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Gardner has also written for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Project Syndicate and elsewhere. He is an environmental fellow at the Smith Center for the Environment, Ecological Design & Sustainability and visiting research collaborator at the Princeton Environmental Institute Center for Environmental Research.

Selected Publications

Environmental Pollution in China: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014.  

The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition. Hackett Publishing, 2007. 

Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Confucian Tradition. Columbia University Press, 2003.