About
Qian Mauro Liu is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures. Trained both as an Italianist and comparativist, he specializes in modern Italian literature and culture (20th-21st century), contemporary continental philosophy, critical theory, ecocriticism, urban studies, African diaspora studies, critical media archeology, experimental art and performance, and comparative literature (Global Sinophone, Francophone, Mediterranean, and Southeast Asian cultures).
His dissertation project, tentatively titled “Urban Exergue: On Blackness, Spectrality, and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy,” theorizes the aesthetic innovation of Afro-Italian literature and visual arts where urbanscapes as the primary dimension open up radically new possibilities for re-imagining Italy's postcoloniality and Black existence. Theoretically asking what a Black Italy signifies as a geographical and temporal imaginary, Urban Exergue reframes Italy’s postcolonial time that absolutizes the historical and sustains the paradoxical role of urban exergue of both substantiating Black existence and producing blurred and phantasmagorical assemblages carved for imaginations. Urban Exergue shows how places and bodies as extraliterary sites and how the speculative futures of Black images help negotiate shifting realities wherein lie the very forces of Black resistance in Italy. By gathering a range of texts, genres, and disciplines, Urban Exergue radically challenges the primacy of insular normalcies in postcolonial Italian Studies, showing how the Afro-Italian context contributes to understanding the transnational complexities of Black experiences and resistance.
His essays or short reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Italian Studies, Modern Italy, Italian Quarterly, Altreitalie, and Annali d’Italianistica, among others. Qian Mauro Liu also translates academic and literary works ranging across Italian, English, French, and East Asian Languages. His most recent book-length translations include John Henderson’s Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), which is forthcoming in 2023. The Chinese version also features Qian’s critical reflection on epidemics, public health, and urban space in light of Covid-19. His translation and critical edition of the Italian writer Gianni Celati's Verso la Foce (1989) is also under contract.
He has received fellowships in support of his research from the Giorgio Cini Foundation, UM's International Institute, the China Scholarship Council, a Rackham Humanities Fellowship, a Ca'Foscari Global Fellowship, and many other grants from the University of Michigan. He served on the Advisory Committee of the Center for European Studies (CES) at the University of Michigan. He is also an Elected Delegate (2022-2025) at the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Recent courses taught at the University of Michigan:
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Italian 270: Made/Unmade in Italy: Nation Branding, Myth, and Globalization (taught in Italian)
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Italian 270: Screening Rome’s Margins: From Neorealism to Italy’s Postcolonial Metropolis (taught in Italian)
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Italian 231: Second-year Intermediate Italian
