James Buzard's area of specialization is 19th-century British literature; he teaches courses in the Romantic and Victorian periods, the history of the British novel, and masterpieces of Western literature from Homer to Dante, among other subjects.

He is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture," 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press, 1993), co-editor of a Victorian Studies special issue on Victorian Ethnographies, and author of numerous essays on 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture. His second book, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. He is head of the Literature Faculty.

Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in contemporary Japan with a focus on media, popular culture, and globalization. His first book Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization was published in October 2006 from Duke University Press. It is an ethnography of the Japanese rap music scene, exploring issues of race, gender, language, popular music history, and cultural politics primarily through the perspectives of Japanese musicians. Through fieldwork starting 1995-97, Condry focused on the "genba" (nightclubs, or "actual site") of Japan's hip-hop scene. He argues that the paths of cultural globalization lead through specific sites of performance, such as nightclubs and recording studios. Such locations help us more deeply understand the dialogue between global/local, producer/consumer, artist/industry.

Condry's current research project is The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story. He is interested in the making of global anime cultures, focusing on the creators in Tokyo studios. January 2006, Condry has been organizing the research project Cool Japan: Media, Culture, Technology at MIT and Harvard. The project involves colloquia and international conferences to examine the cultural connections, dangerous distortions, and critical potential of popular culture. Sponsored by MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies.

Condry earned his BA in government from Harvard in 1987 and a PhD in anthropology from Yale in 1999

Ellen W. Crocker is a senior lecturer in German at the MIT, where she has been teaching the full range of language courses since 1980. From 1989 to 1992 she served as coordinator for German studies at MIT, and has been actively involved in the development of the curriculum for the beginning- and intermediate-level courses in the German Studies Program.

Outside of MIT, she has taught German at the Middlebury Summer School in Vermont and for adult-education courses in the Boston area. Before coming to MIT, Crocker taught English as a Foreign Language in Mannheim, Germany, and in Boston at Northeastern University and Harvard Summer School. She did her graduate study in Applied Linguistics and Modern German Literature at the Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany (M.A., 1976).

Peter S. Donaldson was educated at Columbia (BA ’64, PhD ’74) and Cambridge (BA ’66, MA ”70), where he held the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship. His early research on the convergence of Machiavellian and sacred politics led to the publication of a previously unknown treatise by Bishop Stephen Gardiner, Queen Mary's chancellor, which uses passages from The Prince to reflect on English dynastic politics, and eventually to Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge U Press, 1988).

Since the late 1980s he has focussed on two major research areas: Shakespeare on Film (Shakespearean films/Shakespearean directors and a series of articles now being revised for a book on Shakespeare and Media Allegory) and electronic projects involving Shakespeare across media. These include the Shakespeare Electronic Archive (http://shea.mit.edu), Hamlet on the Ramparts (http://shea.mit.edu/ramparts) and XMAS: Cross-Media Annotation System, which supports the use of DVDs, images and texts in student online discussions, in class presentations and multimedia essays (http://web.mit.edu/shakspere/xmas).

Donaldson has also been a pioneer in the use of media-rich presentations for scholarly and intepretive use, beginning with Ghostly Texts and Virtual Performances: Old Hamlet in New Media (SAA Plenary, 1993) and continuing with multimedia essay/presentations on many of the recent wave of Shakespeare films (e.g. Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments Postmodern Culture 8.2 [1998] on Prospero's Books, online at Project Muse and at http://shea.mit.edu/eob). Donaldson is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), has held research fellowships from the NEH and ACLS, and was the first Lloyd Davis Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Queensland (2006).

Jane Dunphy directs MIT's English Language Studies Program and teaches a variety of subjects in professional and cross-cultural communication (Communication for Managers, Scientific and Technical Writing, Advanced Speaking and Critical Listening, and Communicating across Cultures).

She also collaborates with colleagues across MIT: Providing support to TAs and faculty members through workshops, seminars and consultations on effective teaching practices with the Teaching & Learning Lab; conducting workshops on the basics of intercultural communication for MIT's International Science & Technology Initiative; leading workshops and seminars on the Art of Effective Presentations and the Art of Professional Writing with departments and programs, such as the Singapore-MIT Alliance, Master of Engineering in Logistics program, Science, Technology & Policy program, Comparative Media Studies and Center for Material Science & Engineering.

Beyond MIT, she has designed programs on different aspects of professional communication for a variety of high-tech companies and academic institutions, including Daimler Chrysler, GEN3, the International Institute in Spain, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Harvard College, Yale University and the Heller School at Brandeis University. 

Her research interests focus on best practices in professional communication protocols across cultures. Dunphy is co-author of Strategies for Teaching Assistant and International Teaching Assistant Development: Beyond Micro Teaching (Jossey-Bass), published in 2007.

Kai von Fintel does research in natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language and intersections thereof. His particular interests are in conditionals, modality and presupposition.

He received his PhD from UMass Amherst in 1994 after undergraduate work in Germany and Cambridge, England. He has taught at MIT since 1993.

Mary C. Fuller works on the history of early modern voyages, exploration and colonization. Her teaching interests range from the great works of Renaissance poetry (Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene) to the intellectual and practical aftermaths of Europe's encounter with America in the 15th century and beyond.

She is also interested in material books and how readers use them, in the past and in the present. She has published articles on Caribbean poetry, exploration narratives and video games, early modern circumnavigations, and Renaissance narratives of travel to Russia, West Africa, Guiana, Newfoundland, and Istanbul, as well as Voyages in Print: English Travel to America: 1576-1624. Trips organized by MIT's Alumni Travel Program have gotten her to some of the places early travelers went as a guest lecturer. She has also been studying the Japanese martial art of aikido since 1992, and currently teaches classes both at New England Aikikai (Cambridge) and Portsmouth Aikikai (NH).

Gilberte Furstenberg was born and educated in France where she received her Agregation. She taught English at the University of Paris-Nanterre, then moved to the United States where she became a correspondent for the French news magazine L'Express. Her next career move brought her to MIT where she has been teaching French for the last 20 years.

In her courses, from the very beginning to the advanced levels, she makes use of authentic print, video and multimedia materials in order to integrate culture into the language curriculum. She also favors a cross-cultural approach to the study of materials, as a way of accessing the different underlying values in French and American cultures.

Her research interests lie in the development of interactive multimedia programs for learning French and developing an understanding of its culture. She is the principal author of A la Rencontre de Philippe, a pioneering interactive fiction, and Dans un quartier de Paris, an interactive multimedia documentary. Both have won national and international awards and are published by Yale University Press. She is currently involved in the development of a Web-based cross-cultural project, titled Cultura, which provides a unique comparative approach for understanding another culture.

Diana Henderson's areas of research and interest include gender studies, Shakespeare, early modern culture, modernism, and world drama.

Her publications include the books Alternative Shakespeares 3, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance and articles in Shakespeare: The Movie 2, Shakespeare After Mass Media, A New History of Early English Drama, Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance and several volumes in Blackwell's Companion to Shakespeare. She is also an active participant in MIT's working partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Noel Jackson teaches 18th- and 19th-century literature with a focus on British Romanticism. He is the author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and other essays on Romantic literary culture.