Presently no lecture notes exist
I will begin with a discussion of the state of the art in nonperturbative definitions of M theory. I will discuss some positive and negative aspects of Matrix Theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will then suggest that two of the key shortcomings in these definitions: lack of manifest locality and lack of background independence, might be remedied in a new gauge covariant bulk formulation. String field theory seems to have some of the attributes of such a definition and we discuss some of its features. I then finish by discussing recent work on finding closed strings in open string field theory after tachyon condensation.