About

Asa Zhang is the Frederick Donald Sober Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in English Language & Literature from the University of Michigan, an M.Phil. in English Studies from Cambridge University, and a B.A. in English from Southeast University, Nanjing.

Asa's research focuses on the contested relation between poetic form, ideology, and aesthetic practice from the late Victorian era through late modernism, with strengths in translation studies, lyric theory, and feminist criticism. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, English Language Notes, Feminist Review, International Yeats Studies, and other venues.

Asa is turning her dissertation, "Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895-1955," into a book. Across the genres of epic, lyric, verse drama, and Poetess poetry, her project examines how Ezra Pound, Helen Waddell, W. B. Yeats, Amy Lowell, and others borrowed East Asian materials to meet divergent needs of ideological intervention in modernist poetry’s widened domain of discursive ambition and sociocultural reach after the fin-de-siècle.