Over the past three years Dr Francesca Tarocco has held a Leverhulme Fellowship in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester (project title: Printing and Praying: The Making of Religious Identities in Modern China), where she also works as a research associate at the Centre of Chinese Studies and as lecturer on Chinese history and the religions of Asia. Her current research project links Chinese developments into wider debates over twentieth-century urban and print culture, and my newer research focuses on themes of urban life and re-invention of the urban landscape in Shanghai. Her publications include the first English- language monograph to analyze the cultural practices of modern urban artists associated with the Chinese Buddhist heritage industry (The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism, Routledge 2007) and the first study in any language to analyze the emergence of karaoke in global culture (Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon, Reaktion Books and Chicago University Press 2007, co-authored with Zhou Xun and translated in Japanese in 2008). More recently, Tarocco co-edited with Cosima Bruno a book on Sinophone writers of the post-Maoist generation (Made in China, Mondadori, 2008) and a bilingual (English and Italian) art catalogue on the Beijing-based visual artist Liu Bolin in  connection with his first exhibition in Italy (Liu Bolin: Hide and Seek, Ultracontemporary Artbooks, 2009). She is also working, in collaboration with Davide Quadrio of Hong Kong’s ArtHub Foundation, on a long-term research, exhibition and publication project on the appropriation of Buddhist images by contemporary artists in China, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan.