Doctoral Candidate, Rackham Predoctoral Fellow
About
Asa’s work focuses on the shifting relations between form, ideology, and aesthetic practice in English poetry from the late Victorian period to late modernism, particularly under transnational conditions of production and reception, with strengths in global modernism, translation studies, lyric theory, and feminist criticism.
Her dissertation, Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895-1955, discovers the centrality of “translation,” construed broadly as a set of transpositional practices from interlingual rendering to transcultural adaptation, to the ideological intent and implications of early twentieth-century English poetry. It traces translation as both an organizing logic of modernist formal innovation and as a practice through which transnationalism and Orientalism enter into ideological contestation across four genres: epic, lyric sequence, verse drama, and Poetess poetry.
Asa is at work on a second project that traces a century-long, transregional history of what it terms “artificial authorship.” She currently facilitates the Rackham Student AI Working Group on artistic and (co-)creative applications and challenges.
Publications
"Orientalist Lyricism: Imitation and Japonisme in American Poetess Poetry," Modern Language Quarterly (forthcoming Sep 2026)
“‘A Brocade as Nearly Alike in Pattern’: Transmedial Translation in Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough’s Fir-Flower Tablets,” English Language Notes (forthcoming 2026)
“Noh, Tragedy, and Eugenic Poetics in Yeats’s Purgatory,” International Yeats Studies (forthcoming 2026)
“Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Philosophy of Translation: On Gayatri Spivak’s Critical Transposition of Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man,” Feminist Review vol. 139, no. 1 (2025): 38-51.
Review of Queering Modernist Translation: The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness, by Christian Bancroft, Feminist Modernist Studies, 2022, vol. 4, issue 3, pp. 389-391.
Review of World Literature in Motion: Institution, Recognition, Location, ed. by Flair Shi and Gareth Tan, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020, vol. 56, issue 6, pp. 867-868.
