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 the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy, theorizes a radical Italian intervention that turns to aesthetic experimentation to provincialize historiography and foregrounds new forms of fragments, gathering, and Black sociality. His second book project, Foundations of Displacement: Aquatic Media and the Ethics of Witnessing, experiments with sea epistemologies to explore how the aquatic element as a critical medium can shed new light on the political understandings of the Mediterranean refugee crisis.

Trained both as an Italianist and a comparativist, he 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. Besides, Qian is also an active translator between English, Italian, and East Asian Languages (mainly Mandarin). His most recent commissioned 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 in 1988, Mandarin version in 2025). With Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College), he is co-editing a volume titled Italy's Postcolonial Ecologies: Violence, Displacement, and Resistance (under contract with University of Exeter Press, forthcoming in Fall 2027). With Lydia Tuan (Vanderbilt), he is also co-editing a special issue entitled Territory and Its Discontents for Italian Culture (forthcoming in Spring 2028). 

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. During 2026-2028, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Migration Caucus of the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS). At Ohio State, Qian curates and leads the online lecture series: New Directions in Italian Studies: Migration and Mobility. 

Recent Essays: 

"Queer Mediterraneanism After Liquidity," forthcoming

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

"Italy's Postcolonial Ecologies: An Introduction," forthcoming (co-authored with Giovanna Faleschini Lerner) 

"Review of Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question, punctum books (2025)," forthcoming in Italian Culture (at the request of the authors) 

"At the Edge of Uncanniness: Mediterranean Refugeehood and Traces of Non-Seascape Beyond Horizon," in The Global Landscape of Italian Diaspora: Italy is Made, edited by Michele Monserrati and Derek Duncan, 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)
• FRENCH & ITALIAN 3054 - Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship
• ITALIAN 3224 - Post-Unification Italy: Rome
• ITALIAN 3222 - Modern Italian Media
• ITALIAN 2102 - Contemporary Italian Society