Disease, Illness, and Health Through Literature

Professor Karen L. Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, as well as Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard and President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts. Her research and teaching focus on the medical and health humanities, environmental humanities, gender, empire, inequality, indigeneity, transculturation, and trauma as these relate to comparative literature, world literatures, and the literatures and cultures of East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan), as well as the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean Rim (Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia). Having conducted extensive fieldwork in vernacular archives across East Asia, Thornber works in more than a dozen European, East Asian, and South Asian languages. Thornber is author of four major scholarly monographs. The most recent are Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures (2024) and Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (2020), the latter of which draws on literature from 20 languages and more than four dozen nations across six continents. Her two previous major scholarly monographs both won multiple international awards: Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (2012) and Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (2009). Thornber has also published several co-edited volumes and more than 80 articles and book chapters. She additionally has served in a variety of leadership roles at Harvard, including as Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, Chair of Comparative Literature, Chair of Regional Studies East Asia, and Acting Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.