Julie Hochgesang

More information about my work available here: http://www.juliehochgesang.com/ 

I'm Julie A. Hochgesang /hoʊkˌsæŋ/, a sighted Deaf white woman who uses visual ASL and English (and knows a smattering of other signed languages - mainly Kenyan Sign Language). I've lived in New Jersey, North Illinois, South California, Kenya and the DC area. In short, I'm interested in documentation - the digital record of knowledge that can be openly shared - of the language use of the ASL communities. I believe in making space for all kinds of knowledge, especially those that have traditionally not been shared. 

For a bit of background, I attended college at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) where I majored in English and minored in Native American Studies (1999). I then taught developmental English for two years at CSUN before moving to Kenya, East Africa to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer. In Kenya, I taught for 2 years at a deaf school on the coast and worked with the deaf community in developing a CD dictionary for KSL. When I returned to the states, I wanted to continue work with language documentation so I attended Gallaudet for a PhD in linguistics. I received my MA in 2007 and, in 2013, completed my dissertation which focused on evaluating the use of different notation systems for signed languages in the study of child language acquisition.

I'm currently a professor of Linguistics and teach both graduate and undergraduate courses for linguistics. I also do research and service. I'm particularly interested in phonology and phonetics of signed languages, language documentation (fieldwork, transcription and corpus linguistics) of signed languages, sociolinguistics of ASL communities, and making linguistics accessible to the general community (ASL teachers, interpreters, teachers of the Deaf, or anyone who's interested in knowing about language). I'm currently co-editor along with Emily Shaw for the Gallaudet University Press Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series. 

Some of the projects I've worked on include: a language documentation project with the Deaf Haitian community (LSHDoP) from 2014-2015; SLAAASh (Sign Language Acquisition, Annotation, Archiving and Sharing, 2015-2020) and "Philadelphia Signs Project" (2015-ongoing) with University of Penn's Jami Fisher and Meredith Tamminga. I am actively mangaging the ASL Signbank for SLAAASh which is directly linked to ELAN.

I'm also leading efforts towards creating Collections of ASL for Research and Documentation (CARD). From 2019-2022, I worked on a three-year project with Co-PIs - Paul Dudis, Ryan Lepic Emily Shaw and Miako Villanueva - called "Motivated Look at Indicating Verbs in ASL" (MoLo for short) which is a corpus-based project. During the fall of 2021, I was lucky to work with an incredible group of students on O5S5: Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19 (O5S5 ASL) and have continued that work with colleague Emily Shaw. Both MoLo and O5S5 ASL along with other datasets are being organized under CARD.  

I also love taking photos too, and sometimes videos. I also manage the Instagram account for the Linguistics Department.