Keynote Lecture

Keynote Speaker:
Karen L. Thornber
Acting Director, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature
Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University

Major Publications: Professor Karen Thornber is author of three major scholarly monographs: Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill 2020, 700pp.); Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures  (Michigan 2012, 700pp.); and Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009, 600pp.).  Ecoambiguity and Empire of Texts in Motion both won multiple international awards. Thornber is also author of several (co)edited volumes and more than 70 articles/book chapters on a range of fields in literature and cultural history globally; she is in addition a prize-winning translator of Japanese literature. Her current book project, under advance contract with the Modern Languages Association Publications Program (MLA), is titled Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures.

Major Leadership Positions: Professor Thornber has 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 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, participated in the Provost's Academic Leadership Forum and the Graduate School of Education's Management Development Program, and is currently Acting Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

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 in 1996 (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.

Research Fields: Comparative literature, world literature, global 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), and more recently the Pacific Rim (the Americas, Asia, Oceania); criminal justice and the humanities, global crime fiction; medical humanities, health humanities (including chronic illness, epidemics/pandemics, death and dying, mental health, and disability); environmental humanities, ecocriticism; displacement, migration, diaspora; social justice, including inequality, and economic, 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, Indonesian, and Swahili.