At Williams, Dr Crane teaches classes on contemporary Chinese politics, East Asian politics, and ancient Chinese philosophy.
His book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life (Wiley, 2013), examines how ideas from ancient Chinese philosophy might inform contemporary debates on certain social issues. More recently, his piece, “The Problem of Power in Confucian Political Thought,” Comparative Political Theory 1:1 (2021), argues that Confucianism is ill-suited to serve as a constitutional basis for modern East Asian democracies.
He is currently researching the ways in which people outside of Chinese cultural contexts come to their understandings about China.
