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. He is currently completing a manuscript, Urban Exergue: Black Spectrality and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy, which 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: Water, Media, and the Italian Mediterranean, examines how the Mediterranean seawater as a critical environmental medium can shed new light on the political and ethical perceptions of the refugee crisis. 

Qian’s writings have appeared in Forum Italicum, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Italy, Italian Contemporary Youth Television (edited volume), among others. He is also an active translator between English, Italian, and East Asian Languages (mainly Mandarin). His 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). Qian’s research has been generously supported by the Giorgio Cini Foundation, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and International Institute, and many other grants and fellowships. 

Recent publications: 

"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, forthcoming

"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, forthcoming

"Invited Review of Contesting Race and Citizenship; Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (by Camilla Hawthorne)," in Altreitalie, 67 Luglio-Dicembre, 2023

"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

Recent courses (Spring 2025):