Daniel specializes in early modern and modern Japanese literature. His first monograph, Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the significance of “human emotion” (ninjō)—a historical term for amorous feeling and erotic desire—in defining the canon of the novel in nineteenth-century Japan. This study offers a new integrative perspective on the Japanese novel that challenges the disciplinary divide between Edo and Meiji studies and also highlights important continuities with Chinese literary discourse and fiction.

His second book project investigates the intersection of Japanese literature and aesthetic discourse from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Daniel has received fellowships and research grants from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Canon Foundation in Europe, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and the University Grants Council of Hong Kong (GRF-ECS grant). He is also the recipient of a Faculty of Arts Research Award for Junior Tenure-track Professoriate Staff (2020).