Federico Picerni

Federico Picerni is assistant professor of Chinese literature with the University of Bologna. He received his BA and MA from the same university, and then obtained his PhD in Asian Studies from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in a double degree programme with Heidelberg University. His reserach combines literary analysis, sociology of culture and cultural studies to investigate literature, popular culture and cultural politics in 20th- and 21st-century China. In particular, he focuses on contemporary poetry as a "sociocultural activity"; the literary practice and tradition of worker writers – on this theme, he has published the monograph, Chinese Worker Writers: The Social and Textual Practice of the Picun Literature Group (Routledge) –; and the phenomenon of amateur authors in China at the intersection between cultural institutions, market and digital writing from below. He translates fiction and poetry from Chinese.