As Professor Karen Thornber pours me a cup of tea, a maintenance worker appears at the door, requesting access to the bathroom, which had not been working for the past week. Thornber quickly offers her help before returning back to the little table in the corner of her office in the small Dana-Palmer building on the Harvard campus.

“Sorry about that,” Thornber says with a smile. “There’s always something in need of repair around here.”

Director of graduate studies in Comparative Literature, Thornber has expanded the boundaries of her field. Her target is the fact that non-Western literatures are the minority in comparative literature departments. “For most of its history,” Thornber says, “the field of comparative literature as practiced in much of the world has focused largely on certain privileged European literatures.” By putting marginalized Asian literatures closer to the core of world literature Thornber intends to challenge this model. Even when Eastern literatures are praised or studied, it is generally through a western lens, as if the works of Eastern writers need to seek approval from the dominant West. Even with modern Japanese writers, such as Haruki Murakami, their recognition is based on how well their works can be translated for Western—specifically American—readerships. Rather than accept this rule of approval, which furthers an already outdated imperialist standard, Thornber wants to bring comparative literature closer to the modern global consciousness, and, ideally, attract prospective students.

Karen Thornber has spent her career building a bridge between environmental studies and East Asian literature. While these two subjects seem unrelated, in her book Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan, 2012) Thornber draws a connection between East Asian writers and their fictional characters’ interactions with nature.  In addition to her current responsibilities as director of graduate studies in comp lit, Thornber is director of graduate studies in Regional Studies East Asia (she’s also been chair of  both programs), and holds a professorship in the Department of East Asian Languages. Despite these many distinctions, however, Thornber is easy to talk to. Her office on the second floor of the Dana-Palmer House is a shrine to her passions, with Japanese ceramics, souvenirs from Africa and the Middle East and artwork from China and Southeast Asia all in evidence.

Thornber’s primary areas of research and teaching are world literature and East Asian literature, as well as the literatures of the Indian Ocean Rim; she focuses on literary criticism of trauma and medicine. She has a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a Ph. D. from Harvard. Her dissertation—Cultures and Texts in Motion: Negotiating and Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones—won a Harvard prize, one from the American Comparative Literature Association, and one from the International Convention of Asia Scholars for the best dissertation in Asian Studies. Thornber conducted most of her research for her dissertation by doing fieldwork abroad. “In Japan there were a lot of men who could not understand the idea of a female academic.” Thornber recalls her fieldwork experience with some disbelief. “I would walk into libraries… and they would give me this ‘look.’’

Thornber was undaunted, however, and pursued her research and writing.  Her first book, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard, 2009), explores interactions of Japan’s colonies’ literary worlds during the Japanese Empire (1895-1945), developing a new theory of textual influence, the “artistic contact nebula.” While this monograph was a testament to Thornber’s interest in postcolonial literature, it also challenged the conventional paradigm of literary interactions of unequal power.  Determined to revolutionize her academic field further, three years later Thornber published her second book, Ecoambiguity, which draws on her interest in ecocriticism and explores the ambiguous relationships between people and their biophysical environments.  Both books received major scholarly awards.

Thornber notes somewhat ruefully that just as research in comparative literature is becoming more dynamic, interest in the academic field has deteriorated.

As Comparative Literature departments at various universities and colleges in the United States face dwindling numbers of interested students—part of the national decline in the humanities—the outlook for the major seems grim. Yet as Thornber said, “it is a trend that is affecting all non-STEM majors.” Though students right now may be more interested in majors more apparently applicable to jobs, comparative literature at Harvard is introducing new courses that combine aspects of the psychology of medicine and environmental science with literary analysis. For the undergraduate program at Harvard Thornber has taught two courses, “Literature and Medicine” and “Case Studies in the Medical Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Experience of Illness and Healing ,” that pull in students with an interest in medical careers. That same interest carries over to many of the lectures and presentations Thornber has done both at Harvard and other universities.

Over the course of our interview, we finish every drop of the tea.  Thornber’s welcome and her account of her work and career have delighted and impressed an interviewer; it seems quite clear that students who make their way up the stairs to Thornber’s office and, drawn by the new vision she has brought to her fields, into her courses, will  be equally delighted and impressed.