Federico Picerni is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he also obtained his PhD in Asian and Transcultural Studies, in a joint program with Heidelberg University. His research concerns the relations between cultural production and society from a materialist perspective. Specifically, he focuses on the socio-literary activity of Chinese worker writers and poets, the new forms of critical realism and unrealism in contemporary Chinese novels, and (trans)cultural studies applied to Sino-Italian artistic productions.