PICERNI Federico
Tenure-track researcher
University of Bologna
Research interests:
- Chinese workers’ literature from a global and historical perspective
- Chinese cultural studies
- Materialist critique of literary and cultural production
Federico Picerni is researcher in tenure track 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. He has also spent periods of fieldwork and language training at Xi’an Jiaotong University and Peking University. His research concerns the relation between cultural production and society. Specifically, he focuses on Chinese workers writers and poets, literary amateurism and cultural politics in China, (trans)cultural studies.
Main publications :
- Chinese Worker Writers. The Social and Textual Practice of the Picun Literature Group, Routledge, 2026 (forthcoming).
- « In the Shadow of the 20th Century: Working-Class Literature in China and
the Worker Poetry Journal », in Wiktor Marzec, Magnus Nilsson, Mike
Sanders (eds.), Transnational Working-Class Literatures: Canons and
Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 353-375, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2025. - « Withering Spring: Precarious Labour Migrancy, Class, and Capitalism in Xu
Lizhi’s Poetry », in Gigi Adair, Carly McLaughlin (eds.), Narratives of
Precarious Migrancy in the Global South, 141–155, Routledge, 2025. - « My Story of Us: A Comparative Analysis of Alberto Prunetti and Fan Yusu’s
Working-Class Life Writing », in Mukul Chaturvedi (ed.), Life Writing,
Representation and Identity: Global Perspectives, 175–187, Routledge, 2024. - (with Paola Iovene), « Chinese Workers’ Literature in the 20th and 21st
Centuries », Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (online), 1–29,
Oxford University Press, 2022.