Recently added articles from Sign Language Studies:
Posting Mabel
Oct 01, 2008; ... Postcard I : Calling the Dead Dear Mabel: I confess, I have found my way to you through your husband, Alexander Graham Bell. I suspect I am not the only one who met or wrote you through this channel. Your presence first appeared to me in a poem I once wrote to "Alec" himself. The ...
A Fair Chance in the Race of Life: Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Columbia Institution
Oct 01, 2008; ... ON THE FOURTH OF JULY 1861, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first message to the United States Congress, which he had called into special session to deal with the Civil War that had begun three months earlier. Explaining what the North was fighting for in this war, Lincoln said: "This is ...
A Lexical Comparison of Signs from Icelandic and Danish Sign Languages
Oct 01, 2008; ... TO DATE, NO COMPARISON of the sign languages of Denmark and Iceland has been made, despite anecdotal reports of lexical similarity in the literature.1 Before 1867 deaf children born in Iceland were sent to Denmark to be educated - this practice, together with the strong cultural, historical, and ...
The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools
Oct 01, 2008; ... The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools, by Charles B. Reilly and Nipapon W. Reilly (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2005, 255 pp., hardcover, $55.00). Leila Monaghan THE RISING OF LOTUS FLOWERS tells a truly remarkable ...
Hong Kong Sign Language: A Trilingual Dictionary with Linguistic Descriptions
Oct 01, 2008; ... Gladys Tang, ed., Hong Kong Sign Language: A Trilingual Dictionary with Linguistic Descriptions (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007), 703 pages. THIS AMBITIOUS VOLUME ILLUSTRATES Approximately two thousand signs in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). Organized by handshape, the signs ...
"Life and Deaf": Language and the Myth of "Balance" in Public History
Jul 01, 2008; ... IN 1989 AN INTERNATIONAL GATHERING called the "Deaf Way" was held at Gallaudet University and at various sites around Washington, D.C. The event celebrated the language, culture, history, and art of Deaf people. Registrants from eighty countries attended the weeklong conference and festival, and ...
The Power of Deaf Poetry: The Exhibition of Literacy and the Nineteenth-Century Sign Language Debates
Jul 01, 2008; ... IN 1886, AT THE HEIGHT of the nineteenth-century sign language debates in Europe and North America, Edward Miner Gallaudet, a leading figure in American deaf education, was called before the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb. His goal was to defend the use of signed ...
Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature
Jul 01, 2008; ... Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 264 pp., hardcover $65.00; $29.95 paperback, with DVD). SIGNING THE BODY POETIC is an important, exciting, ...
Lydia Huntley Sigourney and the Beginnings of American Deaf Education in Hartford: It Takes a Village
Jul 01, 2008; ... THE ESTABLISHMENT OF deaf education in the United States has traditionally been seen as the heroic act of one inspired hearing man, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. As Paddy Ladd writes in Understanding Deaf Culture, this is the '"Grand Narrative,' where Deaf communities are constructed solely as the ...
With I. King Jordan
Apr 01, 2007; ... SLS: The accident that caused your deafness must have been a life changing event. Can you put into words what this event has meant for your subsequent life? IKJ: Often when I talk about what "happened to me" as a result of my becoming deaf, I say that if I were to make a list of all the ...
Change in Editorship
Apr 01, 2007; ... LETTER FROM THE EDITOR I HAVE INFORMED THE GaLLAUDET UNIVERSITY PRESS that I intend to resign as editor of Sign Language Studies effective December 31, 2008. The Press plans to name a new editor by the end of 2007 so as to provide time for an orderly transition. Accordingly the Press ...
Learning about Hearing People in the Land of the Deaf: An Ethnographic Account
Apr 01, 2007; ... This article is a personal account, grounded in some concepts of postcolonial/cultural studies (Bhabha 1990, 1994; Hall 1992), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1986; Jacob and Ochs 1995), and in theoretical and methodological ethnographic perspectives (Agar 1980, 1994; Erickson and Shultz ...
Symmetry in Sign Language Poetry
Apr 01, 2007; ... Hermann Weyl opened his classic 1952 lecture on symmetry with a clear definition of the concept: If I am not mistaken the word symmetry is used in our everyday language in two meanings. In one sense symmetric means something like well-proportioned, 'well-balanced, and symmetry denotes ...
Sociolinguistic Variation in the Use of Fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language: A Pilot Study
Apr 01, 2007; ... THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS THE RESULTS from a preliminary investigation into the use of fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language (Auslan), drawing on data collected as part of the Sociolinguistic Variation in Australian Sign Language project (Schembri and Johnston 2004; Schembri, Johnston, and ...
Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
Apr 01, 2007; ... Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, by Michael Chorost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, 232 pp., Hardcover, $24. ISBN 0-618-37829-4)* "To thine own self be true." William Shakespeare, Hamlet BEGINNING A REVIEW of Michael Chorost's fascinating ...
Introduction: Deaf Lives Leading Deaf Lives
Jan 01, 2007; ... LET ME BEGIN at the beginning for the gathering of texts that make up this special issue. Let me start with the original idea for the Narrating Deaf Lives conference (where each of these texts and authors appeared) that was held November 4-6, 2004, at Gallaudet University, and with the inception ...
Creating the History through Deaf Eyes Documentary
Jan 01, 2007; ... IN THE FALL OF 2002 I received a call from Karen Kenton, an executive producer at WETA, the Washington, D.C., public television station. She asked me whether I would be interested in producing a film about the history of deafness in the United States. I live only a few minutes away from the ...
Reflections on Biographical Research and Writing
Jan 01, 2007; ... GOOD MORNING. I am very happy to be here with you at this conference. I look forward to sharing a few personal experiences in narrating Deaf lives. Through these experiences in biographical writing I have seen how such work can inspire young deaf people, entertain, open minds, educate, and make ...
Nancy Rowe and George Curtis: Deaf Lives in Maine 150 Years Ago
Jan 01, 2007; ... PREVIOUS ACCOUNTS OF EARLY DEAF SETTLEMENT in New England have focused on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (Groce 1985), and on southern New Hampshire (Lane, Pillard, and French 2000). This article is based on some findings in a larger project concerned with Deaf settlement in Maine. Maine is ...
Deaf Lives: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Deaf Girls and Women
Jan 01, 2007; ... THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT the lives of nineteenth-century Spanish deaf girls and women.1 The research I present here is contained in a larger work, a book tided Portraits from the Spanish National Deaf-mute School, to be published by Gallaudet University Press. These "portraits" are in fact ...