Edward Baron Turk is the John E. Burchard Professor of the Humanities. He is the author of Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema, which won prizes in both the United States and France, and of the critically acclaimed Hollywood Diva: A Biography of Jeanette MacDonald.

He is also the author of Baroque Fiction-Making, a study of early 17th-century novel writing, and of numerous articles on French literature, cinema and theater. He is currently preparing a new book on contemporary French theater and performance. Turk, who was knighted by the French government, is a chevalier in France's Order of Arts and Letters. He is also one of the prime architects of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program, steering it into existence in the late 1990s.

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).

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.

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.

James R. Glass obtained his SM and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1985 and 1988, respectively. After starting in the Speech Communication Group at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, he has worked since 1989 at the Laboratory for Computer Science, now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Currently, he is a principal research scientist at CSAIL, where he heads the Spoken Language Systems Group. He is also a lecturer in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His primary research interests are in the area of speech communication and human-computer interaction, centered on automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding. He has lectured, taught courses, supervised students and published extensively in these areas.

He is currently a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technical Committee, an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer, and has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.

Norvin Richards received his PhD in 1997 from MIT and is associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.

He is interested in a variety of topics in syntax, including the syntax of wh-movement and the syntax-phonology interface, and has done fieldwork on a number of languages.

He is the author of Movement in Language: Interactions and Architectures (Oxford University Press, 2001), Featural Cyclicity and the Ordering of Multiple Specifiers in Working Minimalism (MIT Press, 1999), and The Principle of Minimal Compliance (Linguistic Inquiry, 1998).