About

Professor Karen Laura Thornber is the Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, specializing in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literatures. Her dissertation, which won a prize, focused on transculturation and intertextuality across Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures. She also holds an A.B. from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a major in Comparative Literature and a prize-winning senior thesis on Japan's literature of the atomic bomb, alongside certificates in Romance Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies, and Japanese Language and Literature. Professor Thornber is a cultural historian and scholar of Asian literature and media whose research spans environmental humanities, medical and health humanities, gender justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and transculturation, including translation studies, world literature, and comparative literature. She conducts research in more than a dozen Asian and European languages, both modern and classical. Her scholarly output includes six single-author large scholarly books, approximately 80 scholarly articles and chapters, and several co-edited volumes. She has held numerous leadership and service roles at Harvard, including Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts, Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Chair and Acting Chair of Regional Studies East Asia, Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature and Regional Studies East Asia, and Acting Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Professor Thornber's research and teaching fields encompass comparative literature and cultural history, world literature, and the literatures and cultures of East Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim, as well as Asian diasporas and intersections with Asian American studies. Her work addresses medical and health humanities topics such as chronic illness, epidemics, death and dying, mental health, and disability; environmental humanities including ecocriticism, sustainability, and climate change; social justice issues including inequality, economic, gender, health, racial, criminal, and environmental justice; gender and Asian/global feminisms; empire and postcolonialism; trauma; and global and comparative indigeneities. She has also contributed to Harvard's academic community through organizing major conferences, directing initiatives, and serving on numerous committees, including the Faculty Advisory Committee for the FAS Dean Search in 2023. Her contributions to Harvard have been recognized under the FAS Sabbatical Recognition Program.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Criminology
• Literature
• Nursing
• Gender studies
• Medicine
• Law
• Art history
• History

Selected publications

• Abusive Medicine and Continued Culpability

  2025-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter first overviews the East Asian literary sphere from the early 1900s to the present, highlighting the significant interplays among the region's creative corpuses. The spotlight then turns to three major works of postwar (postcolonial) East Asian literature that grapple with the colonial and semicolonial as well as the wartime legacy, via depictions of abusive healthcare professionals: the Akutagawa Prize-winning Sea and Poison (Umi to dokuyaku, 1958), by Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996), on the Japanese wartime vivisection of an American soldier; Your Paradise (Tangsindŭl ŭi ch’ŏnguk, 1976), by Yi Ch’ŏngjun (1939–2008), on the mistreatment of Koreans afflicted with Hansen's disease; and Frog (Wa, 2009), by the Nobel Prize-winning Chinese writer Mo Yan (b. 1955) on the horrors of China's former one-child policy. These three narratives draw attention to continued culpability within and across national boundaries.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparison and Gender Injustice in Worlds of Pandemics

  Comparative Critical Studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  With several notable exceptions, comparative literature scholarship has not fully addressed the relationships between literature and global challenges and crises. In our era of multiple intensifying pandemics, not to mention often anaemic humanities enrolments (paradoxical, given robust interest in the arts both within and outside academia), it is crucial that comparative literature go more global: engaging more deeply with a broader array of texts, pathways and processes than ever before with a focus on providing insights into global challenges and crises as well as possibilities for amelioration on a vast scale. This article focuses on three novels: He Jiahong’s Chinese-language Hanging Devils: Hong Jun Investigates (1994) from China; Oh Jung-hee’s Korean-language The Bird (1996) from Korea; and Bina Shah’s English-language Before She Sleeps (2018) from Pakistan. These narratives highlight intersections in different parts of Asia among gender inequities/gender-based violence and corruption in criminal justice, intergenerational trauma and environmental catastrophe, respectively. To be sure, scholarship on literature is unlikely to provide immediate remedies. Yet, by helping readers better understand how literature engages with global challenges, scholarship on literature, including the field of comparative literature, can contribute to increasing motivations and the ability to take the essential leap to become champions for change.

  PublisherDOI

• Foreword

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Decentering the “West” and “China” in China–West Comparison

  Telos · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As the organizers of the series “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” have rightly noted, there is abundant scholarship comparing the cultures of “China” and the “West,” or more specifically Han Chinese cultural production and that of Russia and certain Western European nations. A common approach to China–West comparison is examining cases of cross-cultural engagement, in the form of textual reception, translation, transculturation, travel logs, cultural assimilation, and related dynamics. One of the pitfalls of such comparison is that it frequently takes Western cultural production as the norm, the standard against which most everything else is measured. As Shu-mei Shih persuasively argues, “When we put two texts or entities side by side, we tend to privilege one over the other. The grounds are never level. … It is the more powerful entity that implicitly serves as … the presumed, usually Eurocentric, standard.”1 And as R. Radhakrishnan likewise declares, “Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”2 To be sure, Radhakrishnan cautions that centrisms can and do go in many directions; he speaks of “awareness of centrism, whether Euro-, logo-, Afro-, Sino-, Indo-, gyno-, or andro-.”3 But in comparative literature, as practiced in the United States and Europe, and even sometimes in China and other parts of the “non-West,” the presumed standard is all too frequently Euro-American.4

  PublisherDOI

• The other side of geographies and cultures

  2022-06-24

  book-chapterSenior author

  Like feminism and bioethics at large, feminist bioethics should and has been global in its scope of academic inquiry and socio-political activism. It is often thought that the world’s great diversity of geographies and cultures constitutes a major stumbling block for globalizing essential feminist values, such as women’s rights as human rights, gender equality and gender justice in bioethical settings. However, there exist abundant positive and aspirational resources in societies and cultures in the Global South that feminist bioethics could learn from. Taking the theoretical and methodological approach of “ethical transculturalism,” this chapter critically reviews the feminist bioethical issues involved in three case studies: one-child to three-child population policies in China, the vulnerability of caring for the elderly in China, and female leadership in Taiwan in response to COVID-19, all within a global context. Through these, this chapter illustrates three ways to better recognize the positive side of geographies and cultures to further globalize feminist bioethics: (1) attending to the practical matters that concern the large number of women in the developing world; (2) integrating their lived experiences into feminist bioethical conceptualization and theorization; and (3) promoting feminist leadership in realizing global healing and transforming global bioethics.

  PublisherDOI

• Intertwining Feminisms, Environmentalisms, and World Literature in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics

  Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures · 2022-06-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Ours is a world of pandemics. Intersecting with and frequently exacerbated by responses to the coronavirus pandemic have been numerous pandemics with much longer histories, including pandemics of other communicable diseases, as well as pandemics of non-communicable diseases, mental illness, addiction, systemic racism, social injustice, gender-based violence, and misinformation, all of which have been deeply intertwined with environmental degradation and climate disruption. In our era of multiple intensifying pandemics, not to mention often anemic humanities enrollments, it is crucial that comparative literature go more global: engaging more deeply with a broader array of texts, pathways, and processes than ever before with a focus on providing insights into global challenges and crises as well as possibilities for amelioration on a vast scale. This essay focuses on two examples: the connections between disease and stigma; and the connections between environmental crises and gender-based violence.

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities and Pandemic Futures

  2022-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The fact that the seven identified coronaviruses find their origins in animals is well known, as is the clear connection between COVID-19 and the (often illegal and unregulated) wildlife trade. It is all too apparent that preventing future epidemics will require an overhaul of human–nonhuman interactions. In contrast, it will be many years before we know for certain the ultimate impact of COVID-19 on climate disruption and other forms of anthropocentric environmental degradation. Even as reports proliferated in the early weeks of the pandemic of plummeting air traffic and the increased appearance of non-human animals, from eagles to elephants, everywhere from newly depopulated urban spaces to ordinarily heavily touristed “nature” areas, so too have many climate policies weakened and the use of plastics increased, not to mention the accelerated destruction of the Amazon. What is the place of the humanities, and especially literature, in addressing these challenges? This essay opens with a discussion of the environmental humanities more broadly before focusing on connections between environmental degradation and the literature of pandemics, especially narratives on HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. Case studies will be drawn from China, Italy, Kenya and the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• World Literature, Korean Literature, and the Medical and Health Humanities

  2022-01-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Increasing attention to the enduring processes of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and transnationalism, together with growing frustration with the geographic, linguistic, and conceptual limitations of many fields of literature, has led to burgeoning interest in the discipline of world literature in the past two decades. Institutes, conferences, articles, volumes, and journals on various aspects of world literature are proliferating around the world as never before. But the challenges facing world literature remain significant. One of the largest is the field’s continuing biases, and in particular its tendency—despite its name—to privilege literatures that not only have been embraced by Western readers but also conform to the expectations of Western scholars. Just as important is the relative failure of the field of world literature to integrate the study of literature more comprehensively with urgent matters of global significance and with the humanistic fields that grapple with these challenges, including the medical and health humanities. Focusing on Korean literature and providing as a case study the Urdu translation in Pakistan of Korean writer Yi Ch’ŏngjun’s Your Paradise (Tangsindŭl ŭi ch’ŏnguk, 1976), about Korea’s Sorokdo leprosarium, the chapter elaborates on opportunities going forward.

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan by Jina E. Kim

  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan by Jina E. Kim Karen L. Thornber Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan by Jina E. Kim. Leiden, Nld: Brill, 2019. Pp. x + 209. $158.00 hardcover, $158.00 e-book. Jina E. Kim’s Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan is a remarkable addition to the growing field of intra-Asian comparative literature, as well as to the fields of Korean literature and Taiwanese literature, to studies of imperial and postcolonial East Asia, and to scholarship on global modernisms. This volume analyzes Korean and Taiwanese modernist literature and urban aesthetics from the late colonial period in relational and comparative perspective. It is informed [End Page 364] by theorists from a range of periods and backgrounds, including post-colonial author and theorist Édouard Glissant and his concept of the poetics of relation, as well as Shu-mei Shih and her scholarship on comparison as relation (pp. 6–7, 9–10). Urban Modernities skillfully charts and analyzes intra-Asian (especially intracolonial) and transregional circulations of writers, ideas, and texts. In so doing, it undermines conventional discourse on Korean and Taiwanese literary difference and instead emphasizes intracolonial connections between Korea and Taiwan. The book focuses particularly on the shared experiences of quotidian spaces such as the nation, the streets, and department stores. Jina Kim ably shifts attention from top-down Japanese colonial policies and institutions to the lived experiences of colonized subjects in Seoul and Taipei. These lived experiences, as they are articulated in literary and visual texts, reveal “how the culture of modernity in these cities enlivened the networks of connections, convergences, and concurrences [that created the] shared experiences which form the backbone of global modernism” (p. 7). To be sure, Urban Modernities is not the first book to discuss similarities between (post)colonial Korean and Taiwanese literature. My book Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature addresses some of these connections in the context of similar transculturations of Japanese literature.1 Tseng Tien-fu’s 曾天富 Korean-language monograph Ilche sigi Taeman chwaik munhak yŏn’gu: Han’guk p’ŭro munhak kwa ŭi pigyo rŭl t’onghae pon 日 帝時期臺灣左翼文學研究 examines Korean and Taiwanese proletarian literature in comparative perspective.2 For its part, Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan describes the epistolary correspondence between Korean writer Kim Saryang 金史良 (1914–1950) and Taiwanese writer Long Yingzong 龍瑛宗 (1911–1999), which reveals “the shared plight of displacement and the desire for solidarity between colonized writers in the expanding empire.”3 Kwon’s monograph also speaks of Korean [End Page 365] writer Chang Hyŏkchu’s 張赫宙 (1905–1997) admiration of Taiwanese writer Lü Heruo 呂赫若 (1914–1951?).4 That being said, Jina Kim’s emphasis on the relational aspects between the colonies of Korea and Taiwan, as well as her focus on the city and urban culture irrespective of ties to Japanese literature, significantly expands the grounds for comparison and opens the way for a much broader range of future scholarship. Urban Modernities has four chapters on different aspects of modernity, as well as an introduction and a postscript. The introduction, “Text and the City,” summarizes Édouard Glissant’s ideas on relation and discusses how they have been used by other scholars to explain interactions and connections. Kim uses Glissant’s concepts to provide insights into the significant similarities between colonial Korea and Taiwan. By building relations between Korean and Taiwanese texts and between Korean and Taiwanese authors, Kim is able to do what very few previous scholars have done—to analyze Korean and Taiwanese colonial-period literature in comparative perspective. This book ably demonstrates how comparative colonial literary studies can open spaces “in which new regionalisms, associations, and identifications [are] revealed, imagined, made, or fractured” (p. 13). Kim’s skillful juxtaposition links texts from colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan “within an interconnected history of Japanese colonialism and global modernisms” (p. 14). Placing colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan in a relational mode, she not only reveals their parallels but also, and even more importantly, decenters the metropole–colony relationship. She foregrounds intraregional relationships, particularly those that involve the city (new spaces...

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Frequent coauthors

• Louise Westling

  4 shared

• Elisabeth Hsu

  University of Oxford

  2 shared

• Yu Cheng

  The Seventh Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University

  2 shared

• Angela Fan

  National Yang Ming University Hospital

  2 shared

• Zhibin Yao

  Tsinghua University

  2 shared

• Yulong He

  The Seventh Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University

  2 shared

• Bo Zhou

  InterScience (United States)

  2 shared

• Yulong He

  The Seventh Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Walter Channing Cabot Fellow
• Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center…
• President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts
• Charles Bernheimer Prize , American Comparative Literature A…
• International Convention of Asia Scholars (Leiden) Book Priz…