Dear colleagues,
It is my pleasure to announce the appointment of Karen Thornber, the Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature, as well as President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts, as the next Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning as of July 1, 2024.
Professor Thornber is a scholar of comparative literature and a cultural historian of extraordinary scope, whose research and teaching encompass a broad array of fields, languages, and areas of the world. She publishes on the medical and health humanities, environmental humanities, gender justice, global indigeneities, and transculturation as these fields relate to world literatures as well as the literatures and cultures of East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan) and the Indian Ocean Rim (Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia). An avid global traveler and researcher who has conducted extensive fieldwork in vernacular archives, Professor Thornber works in more than a dozen European, East Asian, and South Asian languages.
Professor Thornber is author of four major scholarly monographs. Most recent are Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures (MLA Publications Program 2024) and Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy Care (Brill 2020). Her two previous major scholarly monographs both won multiple international awards. In addition to having published four (co)edited volumes and more than 80 scholarly articles, Professor Thornber is the award-winning translator of Japanese writer Tōge Sankichi’s Poems of the Atomic Bomb, excerpts of which she read for Empress Michiko of Japan in 2015. Current book projects include Futures of Literary Criticism (under contract with Routledge) and Narrating (Environ)mental Distress: Stories of Ecological Degradation, Mental Illness, and Inequality (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic).
Professor Thornber is a passionate and innovative teacher, adviser, and mentor. She has taught a range of courses at Harvard, from first-year seminars on gender justice and literatures of pandemics, to large general education classes on mental health, to graduate seminars on migration, diaspora, translation, and transculturation. Eager to connect with students of all levels and career stages, she also teaches in the Harvard Summer School and in the Harvard Division of Continuing Education (DCE). Professor Thornber was named Favorite Professor of the Harvard College classes of 2022 and 2023 and has received the Commendation for Distinguished Teaching from the DCE. Devoted to her graduate students, Professor Thornber has served on the dissertation committees of nearly 60 Ph.D. students across 10 humanities and social sciences departments at Harvard.
In addition to being an acclaimed scholar, teacher, and adviser, Professor Thornber has served in a variety of leadership roles at Harvard, including as Co-Chair of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Faculty Study Group, tasked in 2020-2021 with charting how to position the FAS for broad-based excellence, innovation, and sustainability. She has also served as the Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center (one of the University’s largest centers), Acting Director of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Chair of Regional Studies East Asia, and the Director of Graduate Studies for both Comparative Literature and Regional Studies East Asia.
Professor Thornber earned her A.B. from Princeton, with a major in Comparative Literature and three minors (Japanese Language and Literature, East Asian Studies, and Romance Languages and Literatures); and her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2006, with a specialization in Japanese literature in East Asian and global perspective.
In taking on her new role, Professor Thornber succeeds Robert Lue, professor of the practice in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and founding director of HarvardX, who was named the inaugural Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Bok Center in February 2013 and served until his passing in November 2020. The Bok Center was established in 1975 to enhance the quality of undergraduate education in Harvard College. Originally named the Harvard-Danforth Center (in recognition of the Danforth Foundation grant that funded the Center at the outset), it was renamed in 1991 to honor former Harvard President Derek Bok, an active supporter of the Center both during his presidency (1971–1991) and today. By supporting experimentation, innovation, and evidence-based practices, the Bok Center seeks to create transformational learning experiences for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Thornber is an extraordinary scholar, an innovative and passionate teacher, and an experienced academic leader. In a moment when excellence in pedagogy will play a critical role in advancing FAS priorities – from promoting civil discourse in the classroom to harnessing the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence – I could not be more excited to have her in this critically important role.
Sincerely,
Hopi
For more information, please see this Harvard Gazette article.
Hopi Hoekstra
Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
C. Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences
Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences