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Professor 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 in 1996, with minors in East Asian Studies, Japanese Language and Literature, and Romance Languages and Literatures, and her Ph.D. in 2006 from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her dissertation – Cultures and Texts in Motion: Negotiating and Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones (Japan, Semicolonial China, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan) – won both the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Asia Studies and the American Comparative Literature Association’s Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Comparative Literature. Forthcoming from the Harvard Asia Center Publications Program, her book manuscript Imperial Texts in Motion: Reconfiguring Modern Japanese Literature in Colonial and Semicolonial East Asian Contact Zones probes the intricate networks of dissemination, reception, exchange, and creative response that informed literary production in early twentieth-century Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan. She is working on two monographs, one on East Asian literature and the environment and one on postwar East Asian transcultural negotiation. 

A black belt in Isshinryū and Shōtōkan Karate, Professor Thornber first lived in Japan as a teenager. 

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