About
Qian Mauro Liu, Richard & Lillian Ives Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities (2023-2024), is a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures (Italian Studies) at the University of Michigan. Trained both as an Italianist and comparativist, he specializes in modern Italian literature and culture (20th-21st century), critical theory, political philosophy, urban studies, environmental humanities, African diaspora studies, race and ethnicity, Italy-Asia, and Mediterranean studies. Qian also has strong secondary interests in issues related to the Global South, post-socialist Chinese culture, global Sinophone diaspora, post-independence Southeast Asian cinema, and Francophone African/Caribbean cultures.
His dissertation project, “Urban Exergue: On Blackness, Spectrality, and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy,” theorizes the aesthetic innovation of Afro-Italian literature and visual productions where urbanscapes as the primary dimension open up radically new possibilities for re-imagining postcoloniality and Italy's 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. Moving among a range of texts, genres, and theoretical frames, this project inquires about the primacy of insular normalcies in postcolonial Italian Studies, showing how the Afro-Italian context has a way of contributing to understanding the transnational complexities of Black experiences and resistance.
His peer-reviewed articles, essays, and short reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Forum Italicum, Italian Studies, Altreitalie, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Annali d'Italianistica, Italian Quarterly, as well as a chapter contribution to the forthcoming edited volume, Italian Contemporary Youth Television (Palgrave Macmillan). Qian also translates literary and academic works across Italian, English, French, and East Asian Languages. His invited book-length translations include John Henderson's Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press, 2019), which came out in Mandarin Chinese in 2023 with one of China's leading presses, Shanghai People's Publishing House. His translation of Gianni Celati's Verso la Foce is scheduled for publication in 2024.
Qian's research has been generously supported by the Giorgio Cini Foundation, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the China Scholarship Council (CSC), UM's International Institute, the Laura Bassi Scholarship, and numerous other grants and awards. He served on the Advisory Committee of the Center for European Studies at the University of Michigan (2021-2022). He is also an Elected Delegate in the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Coming from a coastal city that was once part of Germany's Asia-Pacific empire, he now lives between Ann Arbor and Queens, New York City.
Recent Courses:
ITA 270 Made/Unmade in Italy: Nation Branding, Myth, and Globalization (taught in Italian)
ITA 270 Screening Rome's Margins: From Neorealism to Italy's Postcolonial Metropolis (taught in Italian)
ITA 231 Intermediate Italian