About
Qian Mauro Liu, a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, specializes in modern Italian literature & culture (20th-21st century), continental philosophy, critical theory, ecocriticism, urban studies, African diaspora studies, critical media archeology, and comparative literature (especially Mediterranean, Francophone and Sinophone studies). His dissertation project, tentatively titled “Urban Exergue: On Blackness, Spectrality and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy,” theorizes the expansion of Black/African diasporic literature and visual arts in Italy where urban cartographies become the primary weapons of Black writings and aesthetics. Theoretically asking what a Black Italy signifies as a geographical and temporal imaginary, Urban Exergue exceeds the provincialism of 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 realities carved for cognitive imaginations. Urban Exergue shows how extraliterary sites (places and bodies) 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, and attributes to the mainstream Black diasporic criticism through which the metaphor of the ocean has enduringly pulsed in multiple national/regional contexts. His essays or short reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in leading journals such as Italian Studies, Modern Italy, Italian Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, and Annali d’Italianistica.
Qian Mauro Liu also translates academic and literary works among all his working 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 Chinese in 2022. Its Chinese version also features Qian Mauro’s critical reflection on epidemics, public health, and urban space in the light of Covid-19. He serves 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:
- Italian 270: Screening Rome’s Margins: From Neorealism to Italy’s Postcolonial Metropolis
- Italian 231: Second-year Intermediate Italian
