Class News
Gerry Shea '64 speaks at the University of Chicago
On March 1, 2019, Gerry spoke at the University of Chicago on his book The Language of Light. Below is the video of that speech. The video contains Gerry's speech (52 minutes) followed by commentary (40 minutes) by three experts in the field.
Gerry provided the following background:
The image and sound are not technically as good as the one I did at Yale, but I loved doing it and did a better job of painting the villains in the history of the Deaf and on the drawbacks of cochlear implants for those born deaf.
The video includes oral commentary on my book by Professor Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor Diane Brentari of the University of Chicago, and Jenny Lu, a Deaf doctoral student at the University.
The talk was sponsored by Chicago's Departments of Linguistics and Psychology and its Center for Language and Gesture. It was organized by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor at the University, whose work on gesture and language I had come across and wrote briefly about in The Language of Light.
The night before I had a pizza dinner near the campus with a number of graduate students and teachers, Deaf and hearing, along with a stellar and jovial interpreter. The entire evening was a non-stop conversation, spoken and signed, about language, with lots of laughter to boot. It was so enjoyable that when I arrived to give my talk the next day in the same building that houses the admissions office, I asked the receptionist if I could apply for admission to the class of 2023. She said with a smile she was sorry, but applications had closed on January 15th!”