Doctoral Candidate, Rackham Predoctoral Fellow
About
Asa’s scholarship concerns the contested relation between ideology and form in English poetry from the late nineteenth century to the present, with strengths in global modernism, translation studies, lyric theory, transnational literary history, and feminist criticism. She attends to poetry’s paradoxical standing as a genre often dismissed as politically inconsequential, yet persistently active as a site of ideological work, one through which sociopolitical influence is mediated in and as literary form, particularly under transnational and global conditions of production and reception.
Her dissertation, Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895-1955, traces the ways a diverse group of Anglo-American modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, Helen Waddell, W. B. Yeats, and Amy Lowell, reimagined notions of nationhood and selfhood in the West through their adaptations of East Asian materials. It discovers how these rewritings served varied needs of reassessment and intervention, in relation to nationalist, totalitarian, and imperialist ideologies, in English poetry’s widened domain of discursive power and sociocultural influence after the fin-de-siècle.
Asa is at work on a second project that traces a century-long, transregional history of what it terms “artificial authorship.” It asks how the boundary between human and artificial writing has shifted, and how literature’s claims to originality, most insistently in poetry, have been strained and reconstituted along that shifting line for divergent ideological and aesthetic ends. 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)
“Noh, Tragedy, and Eugenic Poetics in Yeats’s Purgatory,” International Yeats Studies (forthcoming 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)
“Lily Briscoe Revisited: Orientalism and Female Resistance in To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf and Transnationalism, Virginia Woolf Variations Series, Edinburgh University Press (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.
