INVITED SPEAKERS
 

Marlon Kuntze, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Boston University in the School of Education. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2004, and in 2008 published Turning Literacy Inside out - Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. He is currently collaborating with several institutions on an NSF Center grant called Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2).  Kuntze uses a cognitive linguistic perspective to approach problems of literacy and teacher training.

Carol Padden, Ph.D., is a professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of several books on sign language and Deaf culture. She and several collaborators are actively engaged in an NIH-funded project to describe Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) whose users inhabit a region of the Negev desert in Israel. Their goal is to compare ABSL with younger and more well-established sign languages. Padden uses a wide range of linguistic methodologies, including generative and typological, to answer questions of language evolution as it relates to sign languages.

Ceil Lucas, Ph.D., is a professor at Gallaudet University and has written or edited several books on the sociolinguistics of sign languages, and is series editor of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, which produces a yearly volume consisting of papers in all areas of sociolinguistics pertaining to Deaf communities from all over the world. She is also co-director of a project funded by the National Science Foundation on sociolinguistic variation in American Sign Language. Lucas's sociolinguistic methodologies are both quantitative and qualitative in nature.

Josep Quer Villanueva, Ph.D., is a professor at the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (Catalan Institute of Advanced Research and Studies (CREA)). He was the head of the research group GRIN (Gramàtica i interpretació de llengua de signes, FESOCA-UB), which published the first comprehensive grammatical description of Catalan Sign Language (LSC). He has written numerous articles on sign and spoken language syntax and semantics. Quer was the organizer of TISLR 8 in Barcelona, and he has edited and published a volume of papers from that conference, entitled Signs ofthe Time. Selected Papers from TISLR, 2004 (Hamburg: Signum Press).  He, along with Prof. Roland Pfau, is one of the current editors of the journal Sign Language & Linguistics. Quer takes a formal approach to linguistic methodology.