The ASA Executive Committee now has two vacancies to fill in this election. Active ASA members will receive a link to cast their votes.
You can select up to two candidates. Please cast your vote by 10 October 2026. Voting is anonymous. The election results will be announced shortly after the election is closed.
Candidates
1. KOK Su Mei
Bio
Su Mei KOK is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya in Malaysia. She completed her MSt English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford (2008) and her PhD at Universiti Malaya (2014) on scholarships from the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education. Her doctoral work examined the relationship between Thomas Middleton’s plays and the cultural geography of early modern London, but she has since turned her attention to Shakespeare’s many afterlives in Malaysia, including theatrical adaptations and quotations in political speeches. Constantly seeking ways to excite students about Shakespeare, she has been exploring the usage of worldbuilding games in the classroom and teaching Shakespeare to medical students. Her articles have been published in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Studies in Philology, among others. She is also a contributor to the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A) and an associate editor for SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English.
Statement
ASA has had a profound impact on my career, not least because the formation of ASA and the scholarship of its founding members paved the way for my own research by establishing Asian Shakespeares as a field of study in its own right. Also, ASA conferences are a regular highlight of my academic calendar. I remember arriving at my first ASA conference in Delhi (2016) as a timid interloper who knew nobody and quickly discovering a generous community. Over the years, I’ve increasingly come to appreciate the conferences’ unusual blend of razor-sharp intellectualism and warmth towards students, practitioners, and basically anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. My hope is that ASA remains a nurturing space. Along those lines, I would want to strengthen platforms for young scholars and creatives at the conferences. I also seek to foster stronger networks between ASA members and to create avenues for us to extend our conversations beyond the biennial gatherings. This will allow us to enter into more meaningful discussions and collaborations so that we do not stop at isolated observations about Shakespeare in Asia, but shape larger debates about the role of Shakespeare and the humanities in a world that seems increasingly hostile to both. I am also keen to work towards having the ASA conference take place in Malaysia in the foreseeable future.
2. Amrita SEN
Bio
Amrita Sen is Associate Professor and Deputy Director, UGC-MMTTC, University of Calcutta, and affiliated faculty, Department of English. She is the author of Performing India in Early Modern England 1575-1642: Commerce, Spectacle and the Formation of the East India Company (Routledge UK 2026). She has edited Digital Shakespeares from the Global South (Palgrave USA 2022), and is co-editor of Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury UK 2025), Shakespeare in the ‘Post’ Colonies (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury UK 2025) and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge UK 2020). She has published essays and book chapters on East India Company women, Bollywood Shakespeares, early modern ethnography and Mughal women. Her co-authored essay on “Shakespeare in Bengal” recently won Shakespeare Association of America’s Innovative Article Award. Special issues co-edited by her include “Alternative Histories of the East India Company” with Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2017), “Shakespeare in Bengal,” with Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation (2024), and “The Global folios and other papers” with Journal of Narrative and Language Studies (2025). She completed her PhD in English from Michigan State University (USA) and taught in Oklahoma before returning to India.
Statement
I have found the Asian Shakespeare Association (ASA) to be a kind and welcoming organization, something that I deeply treasure. I hope to continue promoting its congenial spirit and supporting its many activities including the ASA conference. In terms of future plans, I look forward to discussing more ways in which all the members can be more in touch with each other in between the conferences, perhaps through digital events. I will do my best to serve the needs of ASA and its members.
3. Roweena YIP
Bio
I am a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS). I entered academia via a reverse current: having grown up in Malaysia, I received both my undergraduate degree in English Literature (with First Class Honours) and MA by Research in Renaissance Literature (with Distinction) from the University of Edinburgh, UK. Receiving early training in the Anglophone West awakened new critical reflexivity regarding my position as a postcolonial subject interested in Shakespeare: I moved back to Southeast Asia to complete my PhD in Theatre Studies at NUS while supported by a Research Scholarship. My teaching and research, therefore, are always informed by the politics of being located in Asia as a centre of knowledge production while also seeking to situate this knowledge in relation to the rest of the world. My research focuses on gender in productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Asia. My first monograph, the first (and so far, only) full-length study of gender in East and Southeast Asian Shakespeare productions, is titled Towards Intercultural Feminism: Gender in Asian Shakespeare (2025). I am Assistant Director of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A) and a member of the International Shakespeare Association (ISA). I am also an Associate Member of the Inter-Asian Engagement Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. My research has been published in journals including Shakespeare Bulletin and Asian Theatre Journal and edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction and The Asian Family in Literature and Film.
Statement
I have attended and presented at every ASA conference since 2018 in Manila, when I was still a PhD student. The ASA has been a formative research community for my professional development: I see my role as co-organiser of the 2028 Singapore conference as a way to pay forward the support I’ve received and contribute to the continuity of this community. As a major scholarly community for Shakespeare studies, the ASA strengthens the representation and visibility of the research produced by its members in global Shakespeare studies. A question that informs my decision to run for a position in the ASA Executive Committee is: “What can teaching, translating, researching and staging Shakespeare’s works contribute to a world marked by geopolitical tensions, ideological polarisation, and a crisis of the humanities in universities worldwide?” I envision my intellectual leadership of the ASA to be threefold: (1) advancing scholarly engagements with Shakespeare that are comparative across linguistic, cultural and geographical contexts, moving away from the nation as the dominant interpretive lens towards topics-based approaches that examine how Shakespeare in Asia interacts with contemporary issues of our time: gender, critical race theory, technology and the Anthropocene; (2) developing new vocabularies and approaches for teaching Shakespeare in Asia, where his works are increasingly studied in interdisciplinary and intercultural classroom contexts; and (3) supporting the professionalisation of postgraduate students and emerging scholars for careers in academia by establishing initiatives involving mentorship, sharing sessions and workshops (topics may include cv-writing, academic publishing and job applications).