David Thorburn (scholar)

David Thorburn is an American professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is notable for media studies, literary criticism, and teaching. He has published poetry in Slate Magazine, Threepenny Review, and The Atlantic. He was one of the first academics to study the medium of television as an academic field of inquiry. He is the director of MIT's Communications Forum. He is regarded as an authority on modernist literature, and he was selected by the Teaching Company to teach a course on entitled Masterworks of Early 20th-Century Literature.

Early years

Thorburn received a bachelor's degree from Princeton and an MA and PhD from Stanford and taught at Yale. A student, Thomas E. Ricks, described Professor Thorburn as a challenging and thought-provoking teacher, remembering that one of his challenges——to tell why Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury was not a great novel——was one of the "best assessments" he ever got during his studies there. After ten years at Yale, he joined the faculty of MIT in the literature department. His research interests included modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce as well as later writers such as John Updike. His fiction anthology entitled Initiation; stories and short novels on three themes became a popular source for high school and college students.