Karen Thornber’s primary areas of research and teaching are world literature and the literatures and cultures of East Asia, particularly Japan. She received her A.B. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1996, with minors in East Asian Studies, Japanese Language and Literature, and Romance Languages and Literatures. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her dissertation–based on extensive fieldwork in vernacular archives in Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan–won the International Convention of Asia Scholars (Leiden) Book Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Asian Studies, the American Comparative Literature Association’s Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Comparative Literature, and the Achilles Fang Prize for the best dissertation in East Asian Humanities at Harvard University.

Her publications analyze textual production, circulation, consumption, and reconfiguration as key elements of wider cultural and planetary consciousness.

Her first book, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard Asia Center Publications Program; Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 2009), explores interactions among the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds in the Japanese empire (1895-1945). This monograph argues that while actively reconfiguring Western literatures –the subject of most comparative scholarship on twentieth-century East Asian literatures–Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers also engaged significantly with one another’s creative output, forming vibrant nebulae of intra-East Asian textual contact. The study demonstrates how this textual contact both affirmed and challenged Japan’s cultural authority, not only blurring distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also eroding cultural and national barriers central to the discourse on empire.

Her second book, Ecoambivalence, Ecoambiguity, and Ecodegradation: Changing Environments of East Asian and World Literatures (now in preparation), develops new understandings of how cultural products, and literature in particular, mediate the complex interactions among human beings and the (a)biotic nonhuman, especially interactions that involve anthropogenic environmental degradation. A third book, Texts in Turmoil: Reimagining Regions and Worlds (also in preparation), examines interactions among the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds from 1945 to the present in the context of global cultural flows.

Professor Thornber has published articles in The Journal of Asian Studies, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, PAJLS, and chapters in a number of edited volumes. She teaches courses on East Asian and world literatures and diaspora, environment, gender, revolution, (post)colonialism, and transculturation, as well as the Comparative Literature Proseminar and Sophomore Tutorial.

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