Heather H. Yeung (楊希蒂) (b.1984) is Reader in Literary Studies at the University of Dundee. Between 2022 and 2025 she was part-seconded to the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, where she directed the training program and chaired the scholarships panel for English and Scottish Literatures. Prior to this she has taught in the Department of English at Bilkent University (where she now is member of the Academic Advisory Board), and at Durham University. Yeung’s MA in Literary Studies was granted with distinction from Durham, top of class, achieving the Raman Selden memorial award. She subsequently returned to Durham with a full doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK to complete a PhD in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics and theory (awarded 2012, for research involving the governance of affect through spatiality and vocalicity in English, Scottish, and Irish “conventional” and “innovative” poetries, and continental theoretical and poetological approaches), during which time she maintained practical
and musicological explorations of new- and early- music performance practices — which would highly influence future work (to the present) on questions of the technics and politics of tone production –, and began developing a distinctive poetic practice.

Yeung’s work engages the so-called Global Anglophone, as well as Francophone and Teutophone, as the basis of an expansive and ongoing interrogation at the borderzones of what might constitute poetic articulation, and its political force (she draws, too, on languagings ancient and modern to chart these poetological and strange philological textures). She has published numerous articles to this end on writers (e.g. Friedrich Hölderlin, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, H.D., Edwin Morgan, Bernadette Mayer), theoreticians (e.g. Julia Kristeva, Adrian Stokes, Michel Serres), and figures and effects (the hum, the break, the caesura, the sphinx…). Yeung has also translated into English works by, inter alia, Alain Badiou, Gunnar Hindrichs, Quentin Meillasoux, and Frank Ruda, and is currently preparing (with Frank Ruda) further translations of the early work of Alain Badiou, and of Judith Balso, as well as (again with Frank Ruda) overseeing the coming into print of Badiou’s ground-breaking European Graduate School seminars, for SUNY Press.

Her first monographical publication, Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015), expanded the field of the concerns of the PhD dissertation with a poetological conceptual history and suite of close readings, covering Modernist poetic innovations and their contemporary repercussions on poetic environment-creation and was described as a “timely and important” contribution to ecocritical literary studies. On Literary Plasticity (2020) – hailed a “new theory of the literary object” – extends this concern with the poetological, through the method of a far-too-close reading and explosive theorization of the work of Franz Kafka. Following this, an odd pair of studies, The Poetology of the (Modern) Apocalypse (2027) and Echolocations (2028), draws together a trio of polyglot poetic comrades, Edwin Morgan, Etel Adnan, and Paul Celan, ultimately navigating poetry’s immanent critique of immanent critique, its ability to point towards a way out of a negative dialectical framework that theorists propose, when they come face to face with problems of the atomic age and the of how to rewrite ancient atomism in the mid-period of the twentieth century.

Yeung’s current undertaking sees, again, an interbraided study, the first part of which concerns the immaterialist materiality of literary and philosophical articulation and critical aesthetics, taking the form of a comprehensive study of the neolithic and its strange others (clay and plaster slip, and spoliation) in the literature of modernity, paying fine-tuned attention to the ways stone and its (e)strange(d) others have been used to silently undergird imperialist, classist, and masculinist anti-ecological projects, particularly (white-)washing over what is ‘overseas’ from western and central Europe; and the second part of which addresses the material, ethical, and political shock-effects of the apparently immaterial, ephemeral, and durational, in a study of tone in the west — a study that begun as lectures at the EGS –, on the (po)ethics of listening, the problem of judgement, in and with so-called western art-forms.

Yeung’s explorations into (im)materialisms, and the vexed relation of ideas of rhythm and tone to constructions of world (environment- or atmosphere-), were, at an early stage, supported by practical investigations into the poetics of walking, in particular its relation to figure and figuration, voice and space (she edited two volumes on this subject: Critical Dialogues on Walking, Art, Landskip, Knowledge (2012), and On Walking (2013)). At this time, she also began collaborative work which would lead to the establishment of her own artists book and radical poetic practice; significant examples of this early work are: in collaboration with Studio Alec Finlay, the Scottish Design Awards winning, National Trust funded there were our own // there were the others anthology (Morningstar editions), poetic ephemera, and reading-walking events (ca. 2015), and in collaboration with the artist Tim Brennan, ‘Venice Ventriloquised’ – an aspect of the polyvocal polyperspectival Vedute Manoeuvre, presented and performed as part of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011.

Subsequently, her work on the ‘poetry object’ a practice of active resistance to the complex dominations and standardizing principles at play in international book and art trades, allied with a poetic practice which reaches past the monovocalic towards creating poetic ‘scores’ as a form of sequence analysis, includes further awards (e.g. Best Scottish Poem, 2021) and translation (e.g. into Greek, Turkish, German). Since 2019 her primary poetic archive has been held by the Scottish Poetry Library, with subsidiary collections in the National Library of Scotland, and the award-winning Artists Book Collection Dundee; aspects of the primary archive were digitised alongside those of Julie Johnstone and Thomas A. Clark as a part of the UK Government National Productivity Investment Scheme, in a project that investigated the challenges posed to digitization by hypermaterial poetic forms. A book celebration of Yeung’s Hoy Sound Scroll (2016) was produced in 2025, and parallel English-German edition of recent sequences, Aufbruch, in 2028.