Francesca Tarocco is a writer and critic based in Shanghai where she teaches Chinese history and visual culture at New York University. She is the author of The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (Routledge, 2007) and of several other studies in English, Chinese, Japanese and Italian. Running across her research projects is a concern with the roles of Buddhism in the making of Chinese and global modernity. Her current book project is titled The Re-enchantment of Chinese Modernity: Photography, Buddhism and History. Tarocco is one of the founders of the international multi-disciplinary research initiative Shanghai Studies Symposium (http://www.shanghaistudies.net/).