Postdoctoral Fellows at the School of Humanities

 

Federico Valenti is an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow,  working on the project “Unlocking the Keys to Literacy: Phonology, Rhetoric, and Early Chinese Pedagogy” (EduCanon). This project explores the interplay between education, societal structure, and the literary canon during the transition from the Warring States to the Han dynasty (481 BCE–220 CE), when Classical Chinese functioned as a lingua franca. It investigates pedagogical methodologies developed in the Han dynasty to teach literacy through selected texts, uncovering how alliteration, rhyme, rhetorical devices, and recitation were employed to enhance reading and writing skills. In addition to research, he teaches Master’s students in Asian Studies, introducing them to classical texts, lexicography, and philological methods. He earned his MA in Languages and Civilisations of Asia from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2014) and his PhD in Chinese Studies from the University of Sassari (2018). He was a Jing Brand Postdoctoral Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge (2018–19), and has also studied at Peking University and the University of Zurich, among other international institutions. 

 

 

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Ruslana Dovhanchyna, PhD in Translation Studies, taught ESL and translation for twenty years at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. Her main research focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s style and its reproduction in translation. She is the co-author of the monograph Iceberg in the Ocean of Translation: Rendering Hemingway’s Idiostyle in Translation (2014) and the textbook Make Your Way to Public Speaking: A Textbook on Rhetoric for Translation Students (and anyone learning to be persuasive) (2016). In 2024-2025, she was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, researching reader response to Ernest Hemingway’s war narratives in Ukraine and the USA. Currently, she is an ETAg Postdoctoral Fellow working on the project “Hemingway’s War Narratives in Film Adaptations”. The research highlights the possibilities and limits of screen adaptations of Hemingway’s war narratives presented in his novels and short stories. It combines various artistic disciplines, including visual arts, music and cinema, which help to re-imagine Hemingway’s war narratives in different sign systems and media.

 

 

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Daniela Licandro holds a PhD in modern Chinese literature from the University of Chicago.  She is currently an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow working on the project “Embodying Pain: Chinese Women Writers’ Articulations and Memories of Mao-Era Suffering,” which explores Chinese women’s memories of the socialist era, with particular attention to postsocialist life writing and the relationship between gender, embodiment, and memory. Her research interests include gender and cultural studies, political history, feminism, life writing, modernism, and realism. Her work has appeared in international journals such as NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in China, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Modernism/modernity, and Ming Qing Yanjiu, among others. Her ongoing book project, At the Edge of Literature: Writing Self-Criticism in Maoist China, examines confessional practices in socialist China with a focus on the genre of self-criticism as a unique and underexplored form of life writing and as a site from which to attend to unresolved tensions between self and collective, literature and politics, gender and power. 

 

 

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Salvatore Giuffrè (乔峰) is a researcher specialising in Chinese studies, a lecturer, and a literary translator. He is currently an ETAg Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tallinn University, where he directs the “FoxTale” project, which examines the transcultural, gendered, and semiotic development of fox spirits in early Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. He earned his MA in Asian Languages and Cultures (Chinese and Japanese) from the University of Bologna and his PhD in East Asian Studies from the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3. He has taught Chinese language, literature, history, and culture at various universities in Malta, Uzbekistan, Italy, and Greece. His research focuses on Chinese and comparative literature, Confucian studies, Sino-Japanese literary and cultural contacts, and Chinese language teaching. He contributed to establishing Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language option in Maltese schools. He is the author of Every Man is an Island: A Transtextual Study of the Chinese Sonnets of Feng Zhi (2020) and the first annotated translation of Confucius’s Analects (L-Analetti – Konfuċju, 2022) into Maltese.

 

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Arya Priyadarshini is a researcher working at the intersection of trauma studies, environmental humanities and landscape studies. She is currently an ETAg Postdoctoral Fellow with the project Trauma, Risk, and Anticipatory Anxiety in Climate Environments – Himalayan Focus. Her research examines how literary and cultural narratives register vulnerability, ecological crisis, memory and changing relationships with place. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (SELMA), University of Turku, Finland and a Newton-Bhabha Visiting Fellow (2020–21) at the University of Northampton, UK. She holds a PhD in Literature from the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, India. She is the co-author of Narratives for Young Readers on West Asia: War, Trauma and Resilience (Routledge, 2025) with Suman Sigroha, and her research has appeared in leading journals including International Research in Children’s Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics among others. While her earlier work examined trauma, displacement, memory and narrative representation, her current research extends those concerns toward environmental trauma, climate risk and the Himalayan landscape.

 

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Marion Moussier is a researcher specialising in contemporary literature and ecocriticism. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France), where she has taught English, French and translation. She has studied at several international institutions, including the University of Cambridge for her MA and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich for part of her PhD. She is a member of the research group TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects, and Pedagogies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her doctoral research examined how cultural narratives, literary conventions, and scientific rationality interact in climate fiction, with a particular focus on its potential to raise environmental awareness. Currently, she is an ETAg Postdoctoral Fellow working on the project “Climate Change, Slow Violence and Environmental (In)justice in Post-2010 Anglophone Novels”. The project investigates slow violence and environmental (in)justice in the climate crisis through Anglophone climate fictions, drawing on ecocritical, postcolonial, intersectional, and new materialist theories to explore innovative narrative strategies and embodied vulnerabilities.

 

 

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Zarina Mukanova is a social and political anthropologist whose research focuses on kinship, migration, decolonisation, social classification, human rights advocacy, and political transformation in Central Asia and the wider post-Soviet region, particularly Kazakhstan. She is currently an ETAg postdoctoral fellow (2025–2027) with the project *Inclusiveness in Public Catering in Decolonising Post-socialist Almaty: Intersections of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class*, with a comparative case in Narva, Estonia. The project examines how gender, ethnicity, language, disability, and class shape access to urban public space in the context of decolonisation. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, and a researcher at Palacký University Olomouc. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Zurich (2024) and conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. She has also collaborated with artistic, cultural, and civic initiatives in Kazakhstan, including exhibitions, film festivals, public lecture series, and educational programmes on decolonisation, memory, and social justice.

 

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Mattia Dello Spedale Venti is currently a postdoc research fellow at the Department of Asian Studies at Tallinn University. His project “OKIALTGEO”, sponsored by the Estonian Ministry of Education under ETAg framework and awarded the Seal of Excellence by the European Commission under MSCA program, examines the effects of Indo-Pacific geopolitical dynamics on borderlands and the reaction of these marginal spaces to them, using Okinawa as a case study. From July to December 2025, he conducted research on Kyoto city diplomacy and the League of Historical Cities (LHC) network at the Kyoto Institute, Library and Archives (KILA) under a Kyoto prefectural government program for young foreign researchers. From April 2024 to March 2025, he held a Canon Foundation Europe fellowship at Kobe University, where he analysed Japanese city diplomacy with a focus on Kobe. He earned his Ph.D. in Asian Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in July 2024 with a dissertation on Japan’s security policy and public diplomacy strategy under the administration of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. His research interests include contemporary Japanese history, international relations, and subnational diplomacy.

 

 

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Olga Dorokhina is an international relations researcher and an ETAg Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tallinn University. Her current project, “Cross-Border Cooperation as Mnemonic Infrastructure in European Borderlands” (MNEMOBORDER), investigates how institutionalised cross-border cooperation shapes collective memory, identity, and social cohesion in regions affected by geopolitical tension. By comparing three generations of Euroregions, the project examines the conditions under which cross-border institutions foster resilience and reconciliation or reinforce existing divisions. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Georgian Technical University, and her research focuses on border studies, memory politics, borderisation, peacebuilding, and cross-border cooperation in the South Caucasus and the wider post-Soviet region. Her publications include “Borderization as a Tool of Gray Zone Warfare: The Case of Georgia” in Studia Territorialia (2025) and a chapter on European models of cross-border cooperation in Georgia in Europe in the Caucasus, Caucasus in Europe (ibidem Press/Columbia University Press, 2019). Her interdisciplinary background combines engineering training, academic research, and over two decades of experience in international development, mediation, and community dialogue in conflict-affected regions.