Lavinia BENEDETTI
Lavinia Benedetti is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature (SSD L-OR/21) at the Department of Humanities, University of Catania (Italy). She received her Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in Beijing and specializes in classical and contemporary Chinese literature, with particular research interests in crime fiction, erotic literature, gender studies, literary translation, and cultural studies. She is a member of several international research groups, including GISEC-LCS at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and has held appointments as Visiting Professor and Visiting Researcher at leading Chinese universities. She is the author of monographs, literary translations, and numerous scholarly publications in Italian, English, and Chinese.
Lavinia Benedetti is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Catania (Italy). She obtained her Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Tsinghua University (Beijing), one of China's leading research institutions, under the supervision of Professor Wang Ning.
Her research focuses on classical and modern Chinese literature, with particular emphasis on late imperial narrative, crime fiction, erotic literature, gender representations, literary translation, and cultural studies. Her work combines philological inquiry with contemporary critical approaches, including gender studies, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and narratology, investigating the intersections between literary forms, cultural memory, and the construction of subjectivity.
She has held Visiting Professorships and Visiting Research Fellowships at several prestigious institutions, including Beijing Language and Culture University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Binzhou University, and Chongqing Normal University, and has coordinated and participated in numerous nationally and internationally funded research projects. Since 2024, she has been a member of the Grupo de Investigación Sinología Española Complutense: Lengua, Cultura y Sociedad (GISEC-LCS) and of the international research project Wu Zetian at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she also serves regularly as an invited lecturer.
A significant strand of her recent research explores the persistence and transformation of classical literary paradigms within contemporary Chinese writing. In this context, she has devoted particular attention to the works of Feng Tang and Zhai Yongming, examining how premodern aesthetic models and textual traditions are reconfigured in contemporary literature as critical instruments for negotiating history, corporeality, gender, and cultural identity.
She is the author of numerous monographs, edited volumes, literary translations, and peer-reviewed articles published in Italian, English, and Chinese, and has presented her research at major international conferences and academic institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia.