SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Annamaria Bianco is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in Modern Arabic Language and Literature at Aix-Marseille University (Institut de Recherches et d'Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans - IREMAM) and Associate Researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo-DEAMM). She completed a PhD entitled “Adab al-malǧa’: Representing Refuge in the 21st-Century Arabic Novel”, which received a special mention from the IMOMM Dissertation Prize and the AMU Dissertation Prize, which is actually forthcoming with Brill. Her research focuses on Arabic language and literature, with a strong emphasis on translation, adaptation, and comparative literary studies. She is particularly interested in contemporary Arab cultural production engaging with exile, asylum, diaspora, and migration, and in the ways humanitarian discourse and minority experiences are represented in fiction. Her work also explores notions of literary hospitality and the narrative, ethical, and political dimensions of hospitality in literature. In addition, she examines orientalist and neo-orientalist paradigms within postcolonial literatures, as well as the transnational circulation of Arab literary works through prizes, publishing houses, and the global book market. She published several articles on this topics in different journals and co-edited the volumes: Contemporary Arabic Literature and Migration: New Poetics and Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Exil et traduction. Regards sur un croisement fécond (Classiques Garnier, 2024). She serves on the boards of the European Association for Modern Arabic Literature Studies (EURAMAL) and is a member of the French and Italian Societies for Middle Eastern and Muslim World Studies (SEMOMM and SeSaMO). She is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Poésies Toutes ! and she also works as a translator for film, theater, and the press.

Veronica De Pieri is a Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor in Japanese Culture and Literature at the University of Bologna. She got her Ph.D. in Japanese studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice in Contemporary Japanese literature related to post-catastrophe narratives. Her interests have focused on testimonial narrative, trauma studies, and the ethics of memory since 2011, with a comparative perspective (Holocaust literature, atomic bombing literature, 3.11 literature). She has also been trained in Assessment and intervention in traumatic situations (Master Program). De Pieri is currently an Italian translator for atomic bombing and Fukushima literary testimonies.

Chiara Fontana is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Bologna. She earned her PhD in Arabic philology and literature from Sapienza University of Rome in 2018 and has since held roles at several national and international institutions, including Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Postdoctoral Fellow), the Orient-Institut Beirut (Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow), Columbia University (MESAAS, Project Research Associate), the University of Exeter (Collaborator, Leverhulme Project A Sorcerer’s Handbook), the University of Birmingham (Associate Researcher, ERC GlobaLIT), and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (Research Associate). Since 2025, she has collaborated with Freie Universität Berlin on the KALiMaT encyclopedic project on Arabic rhetoric and poetics. Active in the Arab world since 2014, she held a MIUR Research Fellowship in Tunisia in 2017. Her research focuses on Arabic rhetoric, prosody, and linguistics in premodern and modern literature, with attention to intertextuality and canon formation. She also serves as Orientation Delegate and is a member of the Communication Committee.

Joanna Krenz is an associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan. Her research interests focus on contemporary Chinese poetry in transcultural and transdisciplinary contexts, especially its intersections with science, technology, philosophy, and religion. She is also an active translator of Chinese poetry and fiction into Polish. Her publications include the monograph In Search of Singularity: Poetry in Poland and China Since 1989 and numerous papers and book chapters focused on modern literature in China and beyond. 

Federico Picerni is assistant professor of Chinese literature with the University of Bologna. He received his PhD in Asian and Transcultural Studies from Ca' Foscari University of Venice in a double-degree programme with Heidelberg University. His research concerns the relation between cultural production and society. Specifically, he focuses on Chinese workers writers and poets, literary amateurism and (trans)cultural studies. His monograph, Chinese Worker Writers: The Social and Textual Practice of Picun Literature Group, is forthcoming with Routledge. He translates poetry and fiction from Chinese.

Dr. Anna Wiemann is Assistant Professor at the Japan-Center at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. She is the author of Networks and Mobilization Processes: The Case of the Japanese Anti-Nuclear Movement after Fukushima (2018, München: Iudicium). Her research interests include social movements and civil society, social networks, and collective memory. She has published several peer-reviewed articles on social movements after 3.11 and currently conducts a research project on “collective memory and disaster”.

Zhiyi Yang is professor of Sinology at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research investigates how Chinese classical lyric traditions intersect with aesthetics, history, intellectual history, cultural memory, as well as media and culture. She is the author of Dialectics of Spontaneity: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in Poetry (Brill, 2015) and Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times (University of Michigan Press, 2023). Both books now have two Chinese editions. She is currently writing a monograph on avant-garde classicist poetry in the Sinophone cyberspace and collaborating with scholars on an interdisciplinary project of global Sinophone classicisms.