Asa Zhang

Asa's research concerns how poetry acquires ideological uses and aesthetic capacities through "translation" broadly construed, from the late nineteenth century through late modernism, with particular attention to literary relations between the Anglophone world and East Asia. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan, her M.Phil. in English Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in English from Southeast University in Nanjing.

Her dissertation, Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895–1955, traces the divergent national(ist) and supernational ends served by the translations, mistranslations, and transcreations of East Asian materials in the poetry of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Helen Waddell, and Amy Lowell, following these transpositional practices across the genres of epic, lyric sequence, verse drama, and Poetess poetry. It asks how cross-cultural adaptation invests literary materials with ideological significance, and how the formal designs of transnational poetry may complicate or even erode its author's political commitments.

Asa's essays on transnational literature have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Modern Language Quarterly, English Language Notes, Feminist Review, International Yeats Studies, and other venues.