The Team

2 Research Units

7 Researches

UNIT 1

Focus:

  • Literary analysis

  • Corpus development

  • Theoretical framework

  • Dissemination and publications

University of Milan

Simona Gallo

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

The Principal Investigator is responsible for the overall scientific coordination of the project, the development of its theoretical framework, and the organization of dissemination activities.

  • Simona Gallo is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Milan, specializing in contemporary Sinophone literatures and combining her literary research with Translation and Cultural Studies. She has written about self-translation, cultural translation, as well as intertextuality and transmedia poetics, and she is a translator of graphic novels, prose, and fiction into Italian, with scholarly work appearing in The Translator and Babel, and with Brill and Routledge. She is the author of Gao Xingjian e il nuovo Rinascimento (LED, 2020) and the co-editor of Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry (Brill, 2024). She is also editing the forthcoming volume European Geographies in Contemporary Sinophone Literatures: Locations, Dislocations, Relocations (Bloomsbury 2027).

Faye (Qiyu) Lu

  • Faye (Qiyu) Lu received her Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in comparative studies of modern Chinese and Sinophone cultural history. Her dissertation, “Sinophone Cold War Humanisms: Cultural Contestations in Philosophy, Literature, and Cinema,” examines competing articulations of humanism across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong during the Cold War, assembling a multidisciplinary cultural archive that offers new perspectives on global humanism during this period. She is currently co-editing a volume on Re-staging Taiwan in the Global Cultural Cold War. Her work has appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and her Chinese–English literary translations have been published in Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond.

Cristina Dozio

  • Cristina Dozio is Associate Professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Milan. Her research interests are contemporary Arabic literature, humor, urban representation in fiction, linguistic landscape, and translation studies. Her book Laugh like an Egyptian (DeGruyter Mouton 2021) tackles humor and aesthetic innovations in contemporary Egyptian fiction. She has also published about indirect translations, graphic novel adaptations, and collective memory in Moroccan and Syrian novels. She translates Arabic fiction into Italian and took part in the Creative Europe Project LEILA Promoting Arabic Literature in Europe.

UNIT 2

Focus:

  • Spatial analysis

  • Geo-literary cartographies

  • GIS and WebGIS development

  • Dissemination and publications

University of Genoa

Giacomo Zanolin

  • Giacomo Zanolin, PhD in Cultural Heritage and Environmental Sciences, is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Genoa, Department of Educational Sciences. His research is mainly focused on geo-literary narratives and representations, tourism in protected areas and rural spaces, landscape transformations in rural and marginal areas and didactics of geography. He is currently President of the Liguria section of the Italian Association of Geography Teachers (A.I.I.G.), the Liguria delegate for the Italian Geographical Society (SGI), and coordinator of the working group of the Association of Italian Geographers (AGeI) on “Geography and Literature”.

Epifania Grippo

  • Epifania Grippo holds a PhD in Geographical Studies and is an adjunct professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. She is also a Geography teacher at a technical high school in Rome. She serves as President of the Lazio section of the Italian Association of Geography Teachers (A.I.I.G.) and is a member of the editorial board of the academic journals 'Semestrale di Studi e Ricerche di Geografia' and 'Ambiente Società Territorio'. Her research interests focus on geographical heritage and geography museums, the history and didactics of geography, the relationship between geography and literature, and between cartography and literature.

Carlo Giunchi

  • Carlo Giunchi is a PhD candidate in Geography at the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Genoa and an adjunct lecturer at the Catholic University of Milan. He holds an MD in Foreign Languages and Cultures, and his research interests focus on regionalization, inner and mountain areas, geography learning and teaching, and the relationship between geography and literature.

International network

The project has established a wide international research network, involving scholars from leading institutions such as Harvard, UCLA, Cambridge, Duke, and others.