Profile

Dr Cesarino received her PhD from University of Rome La Sapienza in 2013 and in 2016 she completed a Master Degree in “Teaching Chinese as a Second Language” (汉语国际教育) at Nanjing University. She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of China Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Prior to this appointment, she was Lecturer at the South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC, PRC), and Teaching Fellow at the University of Molise (Italy) and the University of Calabria (Italy).

Dr Cesarino is a cultural historian of dynastic China. She has multiple research interests that cover a range of different subjects, such as imperial China's courtesans, unofficial anecdotes, zhiguai tales and Xu Xiake's 徐霞客 (1587-1641) "Travel Diary". These individual projects are all strictly intertwined and together contribute to the major focus of Dr Cesarino's work: to explore the historical value of gossip, anecdotes, informal records and marginal accounts from different perspectives to share light on hidden aspects of late imperial Chinese culture, mentality and history.

In the past years, Dr Cesarino has worked on the representation of Tang courtesans in gossipy anecdotes of the Ming era and on questions related to female authorship and poetic canon. She is currently writing about Xu Xiake, 18th c. Suzhou courtesans and gossip in late imperial China. She is an active translator of late imperial Chinese literature and has recently received a research grant for a project on late imperial "zhiguai" (accounts of the strange) titled "Monster Tales: the Abnormal in Imperial China" for which she serves as principal investigator.

Dr Cesarino has been teaching modules on Chinese dynastic history, classical Chinese literature and literary Chinese. She is currently supervising one PhD student on the project "There is nothing abnormal - the YETAN SILU by He Bang'e" and is willing to consider PhD applications in the fields of Chinese cultural history (Tang to Qing) and classical Chinese literature.