APPLE Lecture 2026

APPLE Lecture Series 2026 Presents

Dr. Steven Thorne

Biography: Dr. Steven Thorne holds faculty appointments in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University (USA), and secondarily, in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). He received an M.A. (in Hindi and Urdu) and Ph.D. (in Language, Literacy, and Culture) from the University of California at Berkeley. His interests include cultural-historical and usage-based approaches to language development, language use and learning in social media and online gaming environments, and research that examines human activity at the nexus of technologies-cultures. He's currently working on a variety of projects that examine technology-mediated language learning occurring within and outside of formal educational settings, indigenous language maintenance and revitalization, and exploring the conceptual and social-material consequences of divergent theories of second language development. In a prior incarnation, He taught Hindi and Urdu (at UC Berkeley and in Pakistan). Over the years he has presented talks, plenaries, workshops and seminars on a variety of language-related topics including new media communication and information technologies, gaming and game-based learning, intercultural communication, Vygotskian and cultural-historical activity theory, corpus linguistics, second language development and pedagogy, and ancestral/indigenous language revitalization. In 2014, he was selected to receive the inaugural Faculty Research Excellence Award for Assistant and Associate Professors at Portland State University.