Wellesley is known for producing secretaries of state and global ambassadors, but the College is less known for its role in educating Deaf women who have gone on to be top academic researchers in their fields.
The number of Deaf, signing alums of the College who hold faculty positions around the country is unusual among its peers. “I can confidently say that I can think of no other institution whose mission isn’t primarily to serve Deaf students—like Gallaudet or the National Technical Institute for the Deaf [at Rochester Institute of Technology]—that has sent this many Deaf women on the path to Ph.D.s,” says Jennie Pyers, developmental psychologist and psycholinguist, who has taught many of the alums. “I can’t even think of a large university that has done the same.”
One of the first was Annie Jump Cannon, a Deaf Wellesley student who was valedictorian of the class of 1884. While she did not get a Ph.D. herself, Cannon became a pioneering astronomer who created the standard Harvard spectral classification system for stars and spent her career as a faculty member at Harvard. Over the last 30 years, the list of Deaf alums in the academy has included Gabrielle Jones ’95, Erin Wilkinson ’99, Annemarie Kocab ’10, and Jenny Lu ’12.
What makes this exceptional is that Wellesley College does not have a designated program for Deaf students. The Office of Accessibility and Disability Resources is responsible for providing accommodations to assist Deaf students on a case-by-case basis. During the years Wilkinson, Kocab, and Lu were at Wellesley, the College hired academic interpreters who came to the classroom and signed all the lecture content and were also available to join the student for meetings with faculty. And when Wilkinson studied abroad in Norway, Wellesley covered interpreting costs at the University of Bergen.
Accessing the space to grow
Kocab, a cognitive and linguistic sciences and English major at Wellesley, earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include language emergence, processing, acquisition, and psycholinguistics. Kocab studies homesign systems, which are gestural languages created by Deaf individuals who do not acquire an external language, and Nicaraguan Sign Language.
“This work all started in my lab,” says Pyers of Kocab’s research. Pyer’s Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development (LLCD) investigates interactions between language and cognitive development across the lifespan. Kocab went on to work with psychology professor Ann Senghas at Barnard College as the manager of the Language Acquisition and Development Laboratory, and eventually she made her way to Johns Hopkins.
On the opposite coast, Jones, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in cognitive studies of teaching and learning, is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Education Studies at UC San Diego.
Jones was born Deaf and grew up in the south of France with very little access to interpreters. She says she had to take control of her education from the start.
“My mom wanted me to be bilingual like the rest of the family and be exposed to both English and French, against the advice of professionals who only wanted me to learn French,” Jones says.
Through her persistent efforts, she was able to graduate from high school a year early despite her teachers’ doubts. And when it was time for her to pick a college, her mother encouraged her to choose Wellesley for its outstanding programs.
All she wanted was a great education where she could flourish. At Wellesley, Jones received the following accommodations: a cued speech transliterator, note takers who gave her carbon copies of their notes so that she could pay attention to lectures, and language tutors.
Jones says the College’s outstanding professors made each lesson feel special and personal; her favorite classes were Russian literature, Russian sociology, and economics.
“I loved Nina Tumarkin. She was really an amazing person,” she says of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies and professor of history. “She would come to class, like, singing Russian songs and telling us stories about her grandmother in Russia and the bombs that they put in cookies back then during the Russian Revolution. So, it was really something.”
At UC San Diego, as an educational psychologist, Jones studies how Deaf children read various scripts and how teachers foster visual learning in the classroom, and she continues to enlighten her department about the Deaf community’s ways of being and learning. She believes that as Deaf individuals, “we can do anything once we are given access to language, resources, and the space to grow in knowledge.”
Understanding the value of good communication
Wilkinson is a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, where she also earned her Ph.D. She grew up in a family that saw Deaf people as smart and capable. They learned sign language to make sure they could all communicate with her, setting the tone for her upbringing.
Wilkinson studied abroad in Norway both in high school and while at Wellesley, and her time there was where she says she learned “so much more about my identity as a Deaf person, a sign language user, and my love for languages as well.”
“At the time, I didn't realize how much I learned and loved languages,” she says. “I had learned languages. I learned Chinese in my high school time. I could communicate well with individuals. I could use language in conversation, even in Norway.”
She also discovered her interest in becoming a doctor, which shaped her college decisions. She considered Rochester Institute of Technology and California State University, Northridge, which have Deaf support centers, and Gallaudet University, a school for the Deaf and hard of hearing. But she did not feel they were strong enough in the medical school area, she says, “so I decided to differentiate my search.”
Wilkinson decided on Wellesley because of its small, female-oriented environment. She ultimately decided against medical school, switching instead to linguistics: “I do love languages.”
Wilkinson also noted that she, Kocab, Jones, and Lu are also all signers, which is not always the case for Deaf academics.
“As Deaf individuals, we have frustrations with communication on a daily basis,” she says, “and we understand the value of … good communication.”
Analyzing multiple perspectives
Lu says she was searching for a college with a safe, accepting environment.
“I prioritized small liberal arts colleges in my early decision-making, and wanted a world-class, interdisciplinary liberal arts education, where inclusion and diversity were paramount to the college’s mission,” she says. “Wellesley exceeded my expectations in that sense.”
As a student, Lu was a member of the Zeta Alpha Society, club crew, and the rugby club. She also organized Deaf Awareness events, which always drew hundreds of community members in the Boston area.
“I was very fortunate to have many peers and professors who communicated in sign language, ranging from conversational to fluent levels,” Lu says. “Many professors were extremely adaptive and resorted to writing and gesturing, and relying on ASL/English interpreters to communicate.”
Lu says Pyers was an invaluable mentor at Wellesley, shaping her decisions about her major and subsequent graduate studies.
“Jennie taught me grammatical properties of sign language, such as classifier constructions, which I had not known about, even though I had been signing since birth,” Lu says. “This experience led me to switch majors from biology to neuroscience, and then, finally, to psychology.”
After Wellesley, Lu earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, and this summer she will join the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA as an assistant professor.
Lu feels being Deaf gives her a unique approach to her work. “Because of my struggles as a Deaf academic, especially during periods when I had no power or influence as a young scientist, I often find myself analyzing multiple perspectives in the moment or across time, in order to gain access to a piece of information or negotiate for access,” Lu says. “Consequently I’ve developed deep interests in metascience, ethics, and sociology of science—all of which inform my research.”