About
Dissertation Title: Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895-1955
Asa's dissertation explores the ways a diverse group of Anglo-American modernist poets—Ezra Pound, Helen Waddell, W. B. Yeats, and Amy Lowell—reimagined notions of nationhood and selfhood in the West through their adaptation of East Asian materials. Tracing both the peril and possibility of these appropriative practices, it discovers how these rewritings served varied needs of political reassessment and intervention—in relation to nationalist, totalitarian, and imperialist ideologies—within English poetry’s widened domain of discursive power and sociocultural influence after the fin-de-siècle. Offering the first sustained study of translation-as-poetry as a site of political engagement in Anglo-American modernism, Translation Un/Bound reveals transnationalism, translation, and Orientalism as converging fields of ideological contestation in modernist literature.
Publications
“‘Not Once but Many Times’: 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 (forthcoming 2025)
“Lily Briscoe Revisited: Orientalism and Female Resistance in To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf and Transnationalism, Virginia Woolf Variations Series, Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming 2025)
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.
