Emily Shaw

Emily Shaw, PhD has been a faculty member in the Department of Interpretation and Translation since 2015. Originally from Washington, D.C., she grew up in Columbus, Ohio, then trained and worked as an interpreter in Chicago, Illinois before returning to D.C. in 2005. While working as an interpreter in private practice, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. In her dissertation Gesture in Multiparty Interaction: A Study of Embodied Discourse in Spoken English and American Sign Language, she employs an interactional sociolinguistic approach to analyze two multiparty discourses. The study pushes further the notion that language, both spoken and signed, is fundamentally embodied. She also has worked extensively on tracing the origin of signs in ASL to French Sign Language. This work culminated in the text A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language co-authored with Yves Delaporte, in which they detail the etymologies of over 500 ASL signs.