Newcastle University

Professor of Linguistics Donna Jo Napoli has been awarded a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, which will allow her to teach this semester at Newcastle University.  Professor Napoli will give a course in Linguistics and two research seminars in addition to a lecturer series in Cognitive Science. 

Donna Jo Napoli got her AB in Mathematics at Harvard, then went on to a Ph.D. in Romance Languages (in their linguistics division) at Harvard with a following postdoctoral year in Linguistics at MIT. She has taught at both universities and colleges in the USA and is presently at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.  For many years she worked in theoretical syntax, primarily on the structure of Italian.  For the past decade, however, she's been focusing on the linguistic structure of sign languages, doing research on phonetics, morphology, and syntax.  As an advocate for Deaf rights, she publishes, as well, in the arenas of education and medical care.  She is also a fiction writer for children, and has turned her attention to a new method for teaching reading to d/Deaf children, with her coauthored book HANDY STORIES TO READ AND SIGN (2009, Gallaudet University Press).

The Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, is meant to enable distinguished academics to spend three to ten months teaching at a university in the United Kingdom.