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Brief Bio

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 large scholarly books, 80 scholarly articles/chapters, several (co)edited volumes), 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 related social sciences.

Professor Thornber currently serves 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.

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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.

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Research and Teaching 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.

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Advising Information

Students, former students, and other individuals requesting a letter of recommendation, click here.

Professor Thornber is currently accepting graduate students in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Regional Studies East Asia. Please apply to these programs via the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences application portal.

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 the Comparative Literature department website before reaching out to Professor Thornber. If you would like to be sponsored through the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, please contact Professor Thornber directly.