Serena DE MARCHI

Current Position

November 2024-October 2025. Research Grant Holder (Assegnista di ricerca), PRIN project 2022: “Chinese narratives and the narration of China in Italy: literature, cinema and art at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and cultural industry”.

Research Experience

March 2022-October 2024. Postdoctoral Researcher, Stockholm University (Åke Wiberg Foundation). “Transgenerational memory and Taiwanese History in Contemporary Fiction from and about Taiwan: 228 and the White Terror”.

March 2021-December 2021. Postdoctoral Researcher, National Taiwan Normal University, 2021 Taiwan Fellowship recipient. “Exploring the Impossible Spaces of Modern Taiwanese Prison Literature”.

Education

September 2020. Ph.D in Asian Languages and Cultures, Stockholm University. Dissertation: “Prisonscape: Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison."

December 2014. MA, East Asian Studies. Sapienza University, Rome.

December 2011. BA, East Asian Studies, Sapienza University, Rome.

Teaching experience

Introduction to Chinese Literature. Bachelor course, Stockholm University (spring term 2017)

Literary and Visual Culture of China. Bachelor course, Stockholm University (spring term 2018)

I’ve also taught single seminars and lectures on memory politics in East Asia; body, gender and identity in contemporary Sinophone literature.

Grants and Awards

(2022) The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Travel Grant for Researchers.

(2022). Åke Wibergs Stiftelse. Postdoktoralt stipendium inom området utomeuropeiska språk (Postdoctoral grant in the field of non-European languages).

(2018). The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Travel Grant for Young Researchers, Stiftelsen Wallenbergsstiftelsen Fond.

(2017). Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), Supra Nordic Scholarship.

(2015). Fondazione Roma Sapienza. Premio di laurea magistrale “S. Darchini, G. De Ruggiero, A. Zedda Corrias, N. Almirante, L. Ambrosi, A. Marchi, V. Marchi, G. Gentile” per i laureati nell’ambito degli studi orientali in lingua e letteratura cinese.

Conferences

(As panel organizer):

14-18 July 2025: Memory Studies Association (MSA) 9th Annual Meeting, Prague. Panel title: “Reconfiguring Chinese history against “state-sponsored amnesia”. Paper presented: “Chinese contemporary fiction and the transnational memory of China’s Great Leap Forward: the case of Yan Lianke’s The Four Books”.

27-30 August 2024: European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS) 25th Biennial Conference, Tallinn University. Panel title: “Memory, history, and representation in modern and contemporary narratives from Taiwan.” Paper presented: “Family as a contested site of memory: historical re-tellings in contemporary Taiwanese family novels”.

(As individual participant):

23-26 September, 2023. “Memoria, identità e intertestualità nella scrittura della generazione millennial taiwanese: il caso di Huang Chong-kai”. Paper presented at the XIX Conference of the Italian Association of Chinese Studies (AISC), Sapienza University, Rome.

4-6 January, 2023. “Memory is Water. (Trans)-oceanicTrajectories of Remembering in Contemporary Fiction From and About Taiwan.” Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Hawai’i International Conference on Chinese Studies (HIICS), Honolulu, Hawai’i, USA.

14-16 October 2021. “Investigating Prison Boundaries in Chinese Carceral Narratives.” Paper presented (via Zoom) at the 74th Annual Convention of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA), Boulder, Colorado, USA.

19-21 November 2019. “Re-imagining the Sinophone Prisonscape: A Transcultural Approach”. Paper presented at the 2019 Sinophone Studies in Europe and the Americas: International Young Scholar Conference, Research Center for Chinese Cultural Subjectivity in Taiwan (Chengchi University), Taipei, Taiwan.

17-19 September 2018. “Re-mapping the Literary Chinese Prison, Exploring Global Prisonscapes.” Paper presented at the Third AHRC DTP International Conference: “Space and Surface,” Cambridge, UK.

29 August -1 September 2018. “Hungry Animals. Exploring Literary Representations of Carceral Bodies in Chinese Prison Literature”. Paper presented at the 22nd Biennial Conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS), University of Glasgow, UK.

21-23 August 2017. “Da poeta a ‘testimone della storia’: un’analisi dell’evoluzione autobiografico-testamentaria delle memorie del carcere di Liao Yiwu” [From poet to ‘witness of history’: an analysis of the autobiographical-testamentary shift in Liao Yiwu’s prison memoir]. Paper presented at the XVI Conference of the Italian Association of Chinese Studies (AISC), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.

7-9 November 2016. “Re-appropriating the Voice: Liao Yiwu’s Prison Writings and the Cosmopolitanism of Dissent”. Paper presented at the Nordic Asian Studies in the 21st Century – Stocktaking for the Future & Nordic International PhD Course, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), Copenhagen, Denmark.

23-28 August 2016. “Cosmopolitan Dissidence? Reading Liao Yiwu’s Prison Narrative”. Paper presented at the 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EASC), St. Petersburg State University, Russia.

25 May 2016. “Defining the Space of Prison: Chinese Literature and the Experience of Liao Yiwu.” Paper presented at the National Workshop for PhD Students and MA Students in Sinology, organised by the Forum for China Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden.

24 May 2016. “Migrating Resistance and Dissident Mobility: The Experience of Liao Yiwu”. Paper presented at the Literature Research Day – Mobility and Migration, Stockholm University, Sweden.

10-11 December 2015. “Defining Prison as a Literary Space: Cultural Discourse in Contemporary China and the Experience of Liao Yiwu”. Paper presented at the Workshop for PhD Students in Literary Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Invited lectures

13/04/2022. “Memoria e postmemoria nella letteratura sinofona contemporanea”. Contemporary Asia Research Centre, Università degli Studi di Milano).

2/04/2022. “Corpi e identità nella narrativa sinofona contemporanea”. ANIC (Associazione Nazionale Insegnanti di Cinese). Parte di una serie di seminari per gli insegnanti di Cinese delle scuole secondarie di secondo grado.

18/10/2021. “History is a Green Island: Memory Practices in Post-Authoritarian Taiwan.” Stockholm University. Parte della Taiwan Lecture Series.

10/12/2020. “Other Spaces, Other Bodies. Exploring the Literary Reconfigurations of the Chinese Prisonscape.” Zurich University.

Memberships

Associazione Italiana di Studi Cinesi (AISC)

European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS)

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA)

Memory Studies Association (MSA)