Qian Mauro Liu

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 (19th-21st century), continental philosophy, critical theory, ecocriticism, urban studies, African diaspora studies, critical media archeology, and comparative literatures (especially 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 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. It contributes 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 Italian Studies, Modern Italy, Italian Quarterly, Altreitalie, and Annali d’Italianistica, among others. He also has a chapter contribution to the forthcoming volume on Italian Contemporary Youth Television (ed. by Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O'Rawe, and Dana Renga).  

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’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, the Umbro Cultura, the China Scholarship Council, UM's International Institute, a Rackham Humanities Fellowship, a Ca'Foscari Global Fellowship, and many other grants from the University of Michigan. 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: Made/Unmade in Italy: Nation Branding, Myth, and Globalization (Winter 2023)

• Italian 270: Screening Rome’s Margins: From Neorealism to Italy’s Postcolonial Metropolis

• Italian 231: Second-year Intermediate Italian