Alvin Kibel has taught at Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and at the University of Reading, England, and has served for several years as the head of the Literature Faculty.

He has been on the advisory board of Partisan Review and has served as adviser to the National Endowment of the Humanities. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The American Scholar, Partisan Review, Daedalus, and The New Republic, among others. He initiated the study of film as a subject in the literature curriculum and initiated and regularly teaches MIT's courses on Literature and Ethics, The End of Nature (subject dealing with literature and environmental issues), and our first-tier courses on the Foundations of Western Culture. He is currently completing a study of fin de siecle culture, and teaches a course on business ethics at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Shigeru Miyagawa is professor of linguistics and holds the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture.

His linguistics publications in syntax, argument structure, and Japanese linguistics include several books/monographs and nearly 50 articles. He was an associate editor of Language, 2000–2003.

Along with linguistics, he runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in multilingual, multicultural societies, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition, Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandprix 2000, and the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. JP NET (http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/JPNet.shtml), which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the Web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993–1994). Visualizing Cultures (visualizingcultures.mit.edu), in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational Web site. It won the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award.

For his work in interactive media, the educational technology magazine Converge chose him as one of 20 national "Shapers of the Future." He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere.

Nick Montfort's digital media writing projects include a group blog about computer narrative, poetry, games and art; the series of 256-character poetry generators; a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and works of interactive fiction, including Book and Volume, Ad Verbum and Winchester's Nightmare. Montfort edited The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland and Scott Rettberg (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader with Noah Wardrip-Fruin (MIT Press, 2003).

He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world's longest literary palindrome.

He is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing. His latest book, co-authored with Ian Bogost, is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series.

Douglas M. Morgenstern is senior lecturer in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section of MIT, where he has taught intermediate and advanced Spanish language classes since 1980; he has also taught beginning Spanish since 1981 at Harvard Extension School.

His work in the field of materials preparation includes contributing to a PBS telecourse and authoring and co-authoring instructor's manuals, audio and video programs, workbooks, and a CD-ROM for high school and college texts published during the last 25 years by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, McGraw-Hill, Heinle and Heinle, and Prentice Hall.

His principal research field is educational multimedia for language learning and teaching, and he has presented and published on methodology, simulation and interactive video. He also designs classroom simulations that do not require advanced technology. He directs the MITUPV Exchange (http://mitupv.mit.edu/), which he co-founded in 2000 with Adolfo Plasencia of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain. The MITUPV Exchange’s inclusion of student biographies and user-generated multimedia content, with an emphasis on digital video, anticipated Web 2.0 phenomena subsequently popularized by large-scale social networking communities. Morgenstern is also working on the design of a new online project with colleagues from MIT, Dartmouth and Harvard.

Paradis's books and co-edited volumes include: T.H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Nebraska, 1978), Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, co-editor (Rutgers, 1984), Evolution and Ethics, co-editor (Princeton, 1989), Textual Dynamics of the Professions (Wisconsin, 1991). Essays in London Review of Books, Victorian Science in Context, One Culture, Writing in Non-Academic Disciplines and Science Serialized.

Deb Roy is a tenured member of the MIT faculty and directs the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab. A native of Canada, he received his bachelor of computer engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1992 and his PhD in cognitive science from MIT in 1999. He joined the MIT faculty in 2000 and was named AT&T Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. To enable this work, he has pioneered new data-driven methods for analyzing and modeling human linguistic and social behavior. He has authored numerous scientific papers on artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining and information visualization.

Roy's research is frequently featured in the media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, National Geographic, Science, BBC and National Public Radio.

In recent years, Irving Singer has been writing a cycle of four books on the philosophy of film, all of which are now finished and have been or shortly will be published by The MIT Press: Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique (1998, paperback 2000); Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir (2004, paperback 2005); Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on his Creativity (2007); Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film (2008).

He has also published an expanded edition of his book Sex: A Philosophical Primer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and recently published Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up as well as new prefaces for the reprinting of his trilogy The Nature of Love, which will be the first segment of The Irving Singer Library that The MIT Press is reprinting together with most of his other books.

David Thorburn is a professor of literature at MIT and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

His most recent books (co-edited with Henry Jenkins) are Democracy and New Media and Rethinking Media Change, the launch volumes in the MIT Press series "Media in Transition" of which he is editor in chief. Other writings include Conrad's Romanticism and many essays and reviews on literature and media in such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, The New York Times and The American Prospect as well as scholarly journals. He has published poetry in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Threepenny Review and Slate. His essays on television, written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his course, "American Television: A Cultural History," were among the first in the country to examine the medium in a humanistic context. He has also edited collections of essays on romanticism and on John Updike as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation.

Thorburn was the founder and for 12 years the director of the MIT Film and Media Studies Program, the ancestor of the Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT's first graduate program in the humanities. Founded 25 years ago, the MIT Communications Forum sponsors lectures, panel discussions and occasional conferences devoted to the political and cultural impact of communications, with special emphasis on emerging technologies. Thorburn has been the Forum's director since 1996.