Valeria Varriano

Valeria Varriano is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Naples L’Orientale.

She currently works in the Department of Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean at the University of Naples L’Orientale, where she was a tenured researcher (230/2005) from 2010 to 2016 and a tenured researcher B (240/2010) from 2016 to 2019. She is the Italian Director of the Confucius Institute of Naples, the Director of the second-level Master’s in Chinese Language Teaching, and a member of the PhD College in Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean at the same university.

Her research, which started with the analysis of Chinese television production in the 1990s, has focused on studying the political and cultural dynamics behind the creation of successful television products. The multimodal analysis of television works has allowed her to describe the emotional storyline underlying the narration, and these analyses have also been used to provide a semantic description of emotional Chinese speech. These research activities have been accompanied by studies in Chinese language teaching to create materials suitable for Italian-speaking students of various levels.