Gilberte Furstenberg
Senior lecturer, Foreign Languages and Literatures Section
areas of expertise: web education, french, literature, multimedia
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.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu