Mental Health, Climate Change, and Connecting through the Arts

Karen L. Thornber

Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations,

Harvard University

Date: 12 Dec 2025 (Fri)

Time: 5 PM (HKT)

Venue: RRST-4.35, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower,

Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome!

No registration required.

The WHO's "Mental Health and Climate Change" June 2022 policy brief calls on world leaders to make mental health a priority in response to climate change. This is one of many appeals in recent years to acknowledge the damage both anticipated and actual environmental degradation, especially from climate change, inflicts on human mental health and well-being. Drawing from my current book Narrating Climate and Mental Health, this presentation will analyze the role the arts, and particularly storytelling, can play as connector - connecting us more closely with one another and with the nonhuman.

Karen Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she is also Harvard College Professor and Walter Channing Cabot Fellow. Thornber likewise is leader of Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts. A cultural historian of East Asia, her teaching and research focus on the environmental humanities, the medical humanities, gender justice, and transculturation, including translation studies and comparative and world literatures. Professor Thornber earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006 and in addition to more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and several (co)edited volumes has published four large academic monographs: Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009); Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012); Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill 2020); Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures (MLA 2024). Her current projects include a book on intersections among climate change, mental health, and the arts.