Dr. David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. He earned his A.B. degree from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Professor Thorburn previously taught in the English Department at Yale University for 10 years. Professor Thorburn is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Rockefeller foundation fellowships. He was the founder and for 12 years the Director of the Film and Media Studies program at MIT. He has won teaching awards at both MIT and Yale, and he was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT's highest teaching award, in 2002. Professor Thorburn is the author of Conrad's Romanticism and many essays and reviews on literary, cultural, and media topics in publications such as The New York Times, Partisan Review, and The American Prospect. Professor Thorburn has edited a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation: Stories and Novels on Three Themes. Professor Thorburn's courses at MIT in modern fiction and film are among the most popular in the Humanities Department. He has lectured widely in the United States and Europe on literature and media.