A 2006 PhD from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literatures), Professor Thornber is a cultural historian and scholar of Asian literature and media working primarily in the fields of environmental humanities; medical and health humanities; gender justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and other forms of justice; and transculturation (e.g., translation studies, world literature, comparative literature). Professor Thornber conducts research in more than a dozen Asian and European languages, modern and classical. In addition to publishing actively (6 single-author scholarly books, 80 scholarly articles/chapters, several (co)edited volumes, Japanese literature translation), Professor Thornber has held a range of leadership and service positions at Harvard and well beyond and taught, advised, and mentored graduate and undergraduate students from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Click here for Professor Thornber’s academic CV.
Click here if you are a current or former student, postdoctoral fellow, or similar of Professor Thornber’s and would like a letter of reference.
Working with Professor Thornber: Professor Thornber is currently accepting graduate students in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Regional Studies East Asia. If you are interested in working with Professor Thornber as a postdoctoral fellow or similar appointment, please apply directly to the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of one of the Centers/Institutes with which Professor Thornber is affiliated (e.g., Reischauer Insitute, Fairbank Center, Center for the Environment, Harvard-Yenching Institute). If you are interested in working with Professor Thornber as a visiting scholar/student in Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature, please see “Visiting Scholars Application” under “Resources” on this website. If you would like to be sponsored through the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, please contact Professor Thornber directly.
Research Fields: comparative literature and cultural history, world literature, and the literatures and cultures of East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan), as well as the Indian Ocean Rim (South and Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa); Asian diasporas and intersections among Asian and Asian American studies; medical humanities, health humanities (including chronic illness, epidemics/pandemics, death and dying, mental health, and disability); environmental humanities, ecocriticism, sustainability, climate change; displacement, migration, diaspora; social justice, including inequality, and economic, gender, health, racial, criminal, and environmental justice; gender, Asian/global feminisms, gender and leadership; empire, postcolonialism, transculturation, translation, intertextualization; trauma; global and comparative indigeneities. Research languages include Chinese (modern and classical), French, German, Japanese (modern and classical), and Korean, as well as some Hindi/Urdu, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and limited Indonesian and Swahili.
Education: Professor Thornber earned her Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2006 with a prize-winning dissertation on transculturation/intertextuality in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures; and her A.B. from Princeton (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with a major in Comparative Literature, a prize-winning senior thesis on Japan’s literature of the atomic bomb, and certificates (minors) in Romance Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies, and Japanese Language and Literature.
Major publications (single-authored scholarly monographs):
1) Futures of Literary Criticism (under contract with Routledge);
2) Narrating (Environ)mental Distress: Stories of Ecological Degradation, Mental Illness and Inequality (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic);
3) Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures (Modern Languages Association Publications Program, 2024, 250pp.);
4) Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill 2020, 700pp.);
5) Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012, 700pp. – recipient of multiple international awards);
6) Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009, 600pp. – recipient of multiple international awards).
Professor Thornber is also author of several (co)edited volumes (including Global Indigeneities and Environment) and 80 articles/book chapters on a range of fields in literature, narrative, and cultural history globally. In addition, she is a prize-winning translator of Japanese literature, and author of numerous reviews and essays. One of her current projects is a book on global perspectives on pasts, presents, and futures of inequality, sustainability, and climate/environmental justice.
(Please see below for more information on Professor Thornber’s single-authored books, (co)edited volumes, articles/chapters, and broader research and teaching areas)
Leadership Positions: Professor Thornber currently serves as Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and as President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts. She has also served as Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, one of the university’s largest and most diverse research centers; Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature; Chair and Acting Chair of Regional Studies East Asia; Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature; and Director of Graduate Studies in Regional Studies East Asia. Thornber was Conference Chair of the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, the largest conference ever held at Harvard (3,500 speaker-participants). She also directed the Harvard Global Institute Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative (2015-2017) and participated in the Provost’s Academic Leadership Forum (2019-2020) as well as the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Management Development Program (2019). She recently was Acting Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (2020) and served as Co-Chair (with Professor Jeremy Stein, Chair of Economics) of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Study Group (2020-2021), tasked with “providing informed guidance to the FAS Dean on how to leverage Harvard’s financial resources to support our academic mission and position the FAS for broad-based excellence, innovation, and sustainability.” Among Professor Thornber’s dozens of committees (over 40 department, division, FAS, and university committees annually at Harvard), she served on the spring 2023 Faculty Advisory Committee for the FAS Dean Search. Professor Thornber’s contributions to Harvard were recently recognized under the new FAS Sabbatical Recognition Program.
Click here for the Asia Center’s 2018-2019 Annual Report, which outlines how Professor Thornber and the Asia Center Steering Committee transformed the Asia Center into a fully-fledged international research center with university-wide faculty governance and an inclusive and leading center for the study of Asia in transnational and transregional perspective.
The FAS Study Group Final Report (harvard.edu), co-chaired by Professors Thornber and Stein, serves as a foundation for current strategic planning in the FAS.
Additional Information on Professor Thornber’s Publications
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, 1895-1945) – Harvard University, 2006, 966 pp.
Dissertation Prizes:
1) Charles Bernheimer Prize, American Comparative Literature Association (2007), for the best dissertation in the field of Comparative Literature in North America.
2) International Convention of Asia Scholars (Leiden) Book Prize (2007), global competition for best dissertation in the field of Asia Studies (2005-2007).
3) Achilles Fang Prize, for best dissertation in East Asian humanities, Harvard University.
Single-Authored Scholarly Monographs:
(I) Empire of Texts in Motion: Professor Thornber’s first major scholarly monograph, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard, 2009; 607 pp.), explores interactions among the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds in the Japanese empire (1895-1945). By developing the new theoretical concept of the artistic contact nebula, this book 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 spaces of intra-East Asian textual contact. Empire of Texts in Motion 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. It analyzes how texts engage vigorously with specific predecessors and demonstrates how literary interactions occurring in sites of unequal power relationships are far more active and complex than the conventional “influence paradigm” has allowed.
Book Prizes for Empire of Texts in Motion:
1) International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Book Prize (co-recipient), for the best book in the world in the field of Comparative Literature published in the last three years by a scholar under age 40.
2) John Whitney Hall Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies, for the best English-language book on any contemporary or historical topic related to Japan in any field of the humanities or social sciences.
(II) Ecoambiguity: Professor Thornber’s second major scholarly book, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012; 702 pp.), analyzes how literature from East Asia and around the world depicts the ambiguous relationships between people and their biophysical environments. It focuses on creative portrayals of the relationships between damaged ecosystems and discrepancies within and among human attitudes, behaviors, and information vis-à-vis the nonhuman world.
Book Prizes for Ecoambiguity:
1) Rene Wellek Prize (Honorable Mention, 2013) of the American Comparative Literature Association, for the best book in the field of comparative literature in the trienneum 2010-2012
2) Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Prize (Honorable Mention, 2013) for the best book-length monograph of scholarly ecocriticism published in the last two years (calendar years 2011 and 2012)
3) International Convention of Asia Scholars, Accolade (2013) for the scholarly work in Asian Studies most captivating and accessible to the non-specialist reader published in the last two years (calendar years 2011 and 2012)
(III) Global Healing: Professor Thornber’s third major scholarly monograph – Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (700 pp.) – was published by Brill in March 2020. Engaging with literature and other writings from 6 continents, more than 50 countries, and more than 2 dozen languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and drawing on scholarship from a range of disciplines, this book remaps the fields of comparative literature, world literature, literature and medicine, the medical humanities, and the health humanities, among other fields. Global Healing highlights the guidance literature from around the world offers into the broader contours and the more detailed particulars of how better to promote healing and enable wellbeing.
(IV) Gender Justice: Professor Thornber’s fourth single-authored scholarly monograph – Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures – is forthcoming from the MLA Publications Program with an expected publication date of early 2024. This book illuminates how a diverse range of writers from across East, South, and Southeast Asia and its multiple diasporas in Asia and globally have engaged with struggles for and denials of gender justice amid pandemics of gender inequity and gender-based violence. These include pervasive inequities in familial, cultural, and social norms and demands, especially as concerns relationships, caregiving, and employment; as well as reproductive, non-partner, family, and intimate partner violence.
(V) Narrating (Environ)mental Distress: Stories of Ecological Degradation, Mental Illness and Inequality (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic) – examines literature and other forms of media from Asia and globally at the intersections of mental illness, inequality, and ecological degradation including climate change.
(VI) Futures of Literary Criticism (under contract with Routledge) – discusses promising futures of literary criticism, given the tremendous popularity of literature and new media, globally
Translation:
Professor Thornber’s Toge Sankichi and the Genbaku shishu, a translation of Toge’s Japanese-language poetry anthology on the atomic bomb, has been published by the University of Chicago, Center for East Asian Studies, as an e-book (2012).
Translation Prize: This translation received the 2012 William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies. In 2015, Professor Thornber read excerpts from her translations to Empress Michiko of Japan in Tokyo. Additional excerpts from this translated volume have appeared in a variety of media.
Guest Editor:
Journal of World Literature 4:4 (2019), Guest Co-Editor of Special Issue on Asia and World Literature
Humanities 5:1 (2016), Guest Co-Editor of Special Issue on Global Indigeneities and Environment
Literature and Medicine 31:2 (2013), Guest Editor of Special Issue on World Literature and Health
Edited Volumes:
Global Indigeneities and Environment (co-editor with Thomas Havens, 2016)
The Poetics of Aging: Confronting, Resisting, and Transcending Mortality in the Japanese Narrative Arts (co-editor with Charles Inouye, Susan Napier, and Hosea Hirata, 2015)
Companion to World Literature, Wiley-Blackwell (Associate Editor, 2013-2014)
Articles and chapters include:
“Introduction: Death and Dying in Modern and Contemporary China” (in progress); “Integrating Comparative Literature and the Medical and Health Humanities” (submitted); “Global Healing: Medical Humanities and Chinese Literature in the World” (submitted); “Literature and Environmental Disasters” (submitted); “Comparison and Gender Injustice: Opportunities in Worlds of Pandemics” (2023); “Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics” (article 2022, chapter 2023); “Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities, and Pandemic Futures” (2023); “Incorporating Japanese Literature into the Medical Humanities Curriculum” (2023); Foreword for Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (2022); “Intertwining Feminisms, Environmentalisms, and World Literature in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being” (2022); “The Other Side of Geographies and Cultures: New Roads to Further Globalizing Feminist Bioethics” (co-written with Jing-Bao Nie and Xiang Zou, 2022); “Decentering the ‘West’ and ‘China’ in China-West Comparison” (2022); “Korean Literature, World Literature, and Yi Ch’ongjun in Urdu” (2022); “Foreword to Energy Policy Advancement” (endorsement for Discourses on Sustainability,” 2021); “Curing, But Not Healing in Pak Wanso’s ‘During Three Days'” (2020); “Trans-Regional Asia and Futures of World Literature,” co-written with Satoru Hashimoto (2019); “Literature and Patient-Centered Treatment” (2019); “Medicine and Literature: Rethinking Humanities Education in Medical School” (2019); “Preface: Manchukuo in Transnational Perspective” (2019); “Mashal Books as Cultural Mediator: Translating Asian, Middle Eastern, and African Literatures into Urdu in Pakistan” (2018); “Commentary on East Asian Ecocriticisms” (2018); “Education for the Future” (2018); “World Literature and Health Humanities: Translingual Encounters with Brain Disorders” (2018); “World Literature and Japanese Literature: Beyond the Dichotomy” (2018); “Is There Environmental Awareness in China?” (2017); “Wolf Totem and Nature Writing” (2017); “Comparative Literature, World Literature, and Aisa” (2016); “Neglected Texts, Trajectories, and Communities: Reshaping World Literature and East Asia” (2016); “Climate Change and Changing World Literature” (2016); ; “The Many Scripts of the Chinese Scriptworld, the Epic of King Gesar, and World Literature” (2016); “Why (Not) World Literature: Challenges and Opportunities for the Twenty-First Century” (2016); “Humanistic Environmental Studies and (Global) Indigeneities” (2016); “Breaking Discipline, Integrating Literature: Africa-China Relationships Reconsidered” (2016); “Abusive Medicine: Constructing the Japanese Empire and its Aftermaths in East Asian Literatures” (2016); “Japanese Literature and Interwar East Asian Modernisms: Reconfiguring the Individual and the City” (2016); “Environments of Early Chinese and Japanese Literatures” (2016); “Empire of Texts in Motion: Where in the World is World Literature” (2016); ; “Care, Vulnerability, Resilience: Ecologies of HIV/AIDS in Chinese Literature” (2016); “Global World Literature and the Medical Humanities: An Overview” (2016); “Ecocriticisms in East Asia and Beyond: Pasts, Presents, Futures” (2016); “Foreword to Japanese Tales from Times Past” (2015); “Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism” (2015); “Wenhua zhuanyi wangluo he quanqiuxing bijiao: Yazhou, Feizhou, Dayangzhou he Meizhou wenxuezhong de renlei zhongxinzhuyi shengtaiguan he ‘shengtai bendu jumin’” (Transcultural Networks and Global Comparison: Anthropocentric Ecologies and the ‘Ecological Native’ in Literature from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas) (2015); “Paradoxes of Conservation and Comparison: Taiwan, Environmental Crises and World Literatures” (2015); “Japanese Literature and International Environmental Crises” (2014); “Tính hợp thức, cộng đồng và chủ nghĩa hậu thực dân: nhà văn và văn bản du hành ở Đông Á sau 1945” (Legitimacy, Community, and Postcolonialism: Traveling Writers and Texts in Post-1945 East Asia) (2014);“Orality, Silence, and Recovery in South African, Cambodian, and Nigerian Literatures” (2014); “Ecocriticisms in East Asia and Beyond: Pasts, Presents, Futures” (2014); “Lý thuyết chấn thương” (Trauma Theory) (2014); “Tính liên văn bản hay Cộng đồng di dân” (2014); “Global World Literature and the Medical Humanities: An Overview” (2014); “Chinese Literary Landscapes of SARS and HIV/AIDS: On Hubris and Vulnerability” (2014); “Comparative Literature, World Literature, and Asia” (2014); “Capitalizing on Contradiction: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures” (2014); “Modernist Literary Production in East Asia” (2015); “Anthropocentric Ecologies and the ‘Ecological Native’ in Native American, Maori, and Aboriginal Taiwanese Literatures” (2014); “Chinese Literature and Environmental Crises: Plundering Borderlands North and South” (2014); “Literature and Environment: New Approaches to Ecocriticism” (2014); “Alberto Barrera Tyszka, La enfermedad“; “Tính hợp thức, cộng đồng và chủ nghĩa hậu thực dân: nhà văn và văn bản du hành ở Đông Á sau 1945” (Legitimacy, Community, and Postcolonialism: Traveling Writers and Texts in Post-1945 East Asia) (2014); “Lý thuyết chấn thương” (Trauma Theory) (2014); “Tính liên văn bản hay Cộng đồng di dân” (Intertextuality or Diaspora) (2014); “Literature, Asia, and the Anthropocene: Possibilities for Asian Studies and the Environmental Humanities” (2014); “Japanese Literature and International Environmental Crises” (2014); “Literature and the Environment: Local Approaches to Ecocriticism” (2014); “Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures: Uncertain Presents and Futures” (2014); “Rethinking the World in World Literature: East Asia and Literary Contact Nebulae” (2014); “Hansi shijie wenxue zhong de shijie – Taiwan, Zhongguo dalu, Dongya ji wenxue jiechu xingyun” (Rethinking the World in World Literature: Taiwan, Mainland China, East Asia, and Literary Contact Nebulae) (2014); “Overwhelming Disease and Nature: New Perspectives on Ariyoshi Sawako and Amitav Ghosh” (2013); “World Literature and Global Health: Reconfiguring Literature and Medicine” (2013); “Global Health and World Literature: Translating Silences in Cambodian Writing on Sex Slavery” (2013); “Afterword: Ecocritical and Literary Futures” (2013); “Japanese Literature and Environmental Crises” (2013); “Nature, Humanity, and Uncertain Futures: East Asian Literatures and Environmental Degradation” (2013); “Shejie wenxue yu shengtai piping: Tanjiu Dongya wenxue zuopinzhong feirenlei de fusuli [World Literature and Ecocriticism: Questioning Nonhuman Resilience in East Asian Literatures]” (2012); “Dajiang Jiansanlang [Oe Kenzaburo]: quyu, quanqiu he he wenti de shuxiezhe [Oe Kenzaburo: Writing Regional, Global, and Nuclear Problems]” (2012); “Ishimure Michiko, Literature, and Environmental Ambiguity” (2012); “Acquiescing to Environmental Degradation: Literary Dynamics of Resignation” (2012); “Collaborating, Acquiescing, Resisting: Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Transculturation of Japanese Literature” (2012); “Green Paradoxes: Literature and Environmental Crises in Korea, China, and Japan” (2012); “1920 nendai no Higashi Ajia bunka kōryū to kantekusutosei” (2011); “Literature and Environment” (2011); “Legitimacy and Community: Traveling Writers and Texts in Post-1945 East Asia” (2010); “Degendering Ecodegradation and Rethinking Ecofeminisms in the Writing of Kurihara Sadako, Sakaki Nanao, and Ichimure Michiko” (2010); “Responsibility and Japanese Literature of the Atomic Bomb” (2010); “Ecological Urbanism and East Asian Literatures” (2009); “Early Twentieth-Century Intra-East Asian Literary Contact Nebulae: Transculturating Censored Japanese Literature in Chinese and Korean Literatures” (2009); “Ecocriticism and Japanese Literature of the Avant Garde” (2009); “French Discourse in Chinese, in Chinese Discourse in French – Paradoxes of Chinese Francophone Émigré Writing” (2009); “Translation and the Borders of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature” (2008); “Itinerant Clouds, Sooty Trains, and Peripatetic Memories: Travel in Hayashi Fumiko’s Ukigumo” (2007); “Reconfiguring Japanese Literature in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia: The Enpon Boom, the Uchiyama Shoten, and the Growth of Transasian Literary Communities” (2006); “When the Protagonist is Death: Implicating Text and Reader in Trilogies of Hiroshima and Auschwitz” (2004); “Literature of the Atomic Bomb” (2001).
Courses Taught:
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
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