Qian [Mauro] Liu is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics, and critical theory, with a specific focus on Italy’s transnational networks with the Global South. His first manuscript, Urban Exergue: Blackness and (Post-)Apocalyptic Geographies in Contemporary Italy, theorizes the aesthetic innovation of Afro-Italian literary and visual productions where urbanscape, as the primary dimension, opens up radical new possibilities for reimagining Italy’s postcoloniality. By delving into the ever-shifting epistemologies of Black urban imaginaries and investigating how disrupted notions of temporal linearity and spatial fixity are articulated, this project paradoxically affirms the presence of Black communities within Italy’s metropolitan centers while embracing the production of multifaceted and multidirectional landscapes that pave the way for imaginations. His second book project, Foundations of Displacement: Aquatic Media and the Ethics of Witnessing, experiments with sea epistemologies through a variety of topics, such as computational ethics, sound poetics, refugee subjectivities, and the intersection of art and political philosophy, examining how the aquatic element as a critical medium can shed new light on the political understandings of the Mediterranean refugee crisis. 

His scholarship draws widely from continental thoughts, Black critical theories, film and visual arts, and race and ethnicity studies. Reading across languages, he brings contemporary Italy into critical dialogues with other cultural traditions, such as Francophone, Global Sinophone, and American Ethnic cultures. Qian’s writings have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Forum Italicum, California Italian Studies, Annali d’Italianistica, Ecozon@, as well as in several edited volumes and catalogue essays for artists such as Livia Dubon Bohlig and Paolo Shuai Peng, among others. He is regularly invited to write review essays for journals in Italian Studies and beyond, such as gender/sexuality/italy, Italian Culture, Annali d'Italianistica, and Altreitalie. He is also an active translator between English, Italian, and East Asian Languages (mainly Mandarin). His most recent invited book-length translations include John Henderson’s Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press in 2019, Mandarin version in 2023) and Gianni Celati's Verso la foce (Feltrinelli, 1988). With Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, he is also co-editing a volume titled Italy's Postcolonial Ecologies: Elements, Power, and Resistance.  

He earned his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan (2024), where he was the Richard & Lillian Ives Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities (2023-2024). In 2022, he was also a Visiting Fellow at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy. At Ohio State, Qian curates and leads the online lecture series: New Directions in Italian Studies: Migration and Mobility. With Jonathan Mullins, he co-convenes the international conference on Modern Italian Studies "Rupture and Repair". 

Recent publications: 

"Scaling Blackness (Or: Italy's Afropolitan Fantasy)", forthcoming

"At the Edge of Uncanniness: Mediterranean Refugeehood and Traces of Non-Seascape Beyond Horizon," in Italy is Made: The Global Landscape of Italian Diaspora, edited by Derek Duncan and Michele Monserrati, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming (invited) 

"Fictive Archive, Temporal Reparations, and Italy's 'Postcolonial Now'" in California Italian Studies (Guest Editors: Angelica Pesarini and Camilla Hawthorne), 14 (1), 2025, 1-16

"Visualizing the Invisible: Zero and Afro-Italian Urban Utopias" in Contemporary Italian Youth Television, Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O'Rawe, and Dana Renga, 2025, 263-267

"The Pitfalls of Transnational Italian Studies?" in H-Net TransItalian Studies, 2024 (invited) 

"Between Land and Sea: The Aesthetics of Diasporic Ecologies" in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment, Vol.15, No.2 (2024): 297-304

"Contesting the Black Flaneur: the rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature" in Forum Italicum, 2023, Vol. 57 (3) 938-955

"Review of Camilla Hawthorne, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022)," Altreitalie, N.67, luglio-dicembre, 2023 (invited) 

Recent courses: 

• FRENCH & ITALIAN 8602 - Care, Intimacy, & Politics (Graduate Seminar)
• FRENCH & ITALIAN 8899 - Dissertation Workshop (Graduate Seminar)
• ITALIAN 3224 - Post-Unification Italy
• ITALIAN 3222 - Modern Italian Media
• ITALIAN 2102 - Contemporary Italian Society