About
Asa's 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. Offering the first sustained study of translation-as-poetry as a means of political engagement, Translation Un/Bound shows transnationalism, translation, and Orientalism as converging fields of ideological contestation in modernist literature.
Publications
“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.
