Karen Thornber is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her primary areas of research and teaching are world literature and the literatures and cultures of East Asia. Professor Thornber received her Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2006, and in 2007 she was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association’s Charles Bernheimer Prize for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Literature in North America. Her Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009) is the first book in any language to analyze the complex relationships among the imperial Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese literary worlds (1895-1945). It is based on extensive vernacular archival research in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Her second monograph, scheduled to be completed later this year, is titled Intertwining Bodies and Bodyscapes: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures; this book analyzes East Asian literary negotiations of human/nonhuman interactions from premodern times to the present in the context of world literature on environmental crises. Her third monograph, also well underway, explores postwar (postcolonial) intra-East Asian cultural negotiation in the context of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century global cultural flows. Professor Thornber has articles/chapters published and forthcoming in a variety of venues, including The Journal of Asian Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, PAJLS, Japan Focus, and a number of edited volumes. Now in her second year on the faculty at Harvard, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Literature and Diaspora, Literature and the Environment, Literature and Gender/Revolution, the Poetics of Empire, and Thinking and Writing Transculturally, as well as the Literature Concentration’s Sophomore Tutorial and the Comparative Literature Proseminar.
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