Karen Thornber is Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.  Having earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard in 2006, she is the author of Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009), which won both the Association for Asian Studies John Whitney Hall Book Prize (2011) for the best English-language book on Japan and the International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Book Prize (2010) for the best book in the field of Comparative Literature in the last three years by a scholar under age forty. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012) is her second book.  Her translation of the atomic-bomb writer Tōge Sankichi’s Genbaku shishū (Poems of the Atomic Bomb, 1952), published as an e-book by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies, won the 2012 William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies.  She is currently studying Hindi and Urdu for her current book project, Global Health and World Literature: East Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim.