Bencie
Woll came to the Department of Language and Communication
Science at City University London in 1995 to take up the newly created
Chair in Sign Language and Deaf Studies, the first chair in this
field in the UK.
Before joining City University, Professor Woll
was at the University of Bristol, where she first worked on language
acquisition and then was a co-founder of the Centre for Deaf Studies,
pioneering research on the linguistics of BSL and on Deaf Studies
as an academic discipline.
Her research and teaching interests embrace a
wide range of topics related to sign language, including the linguistics
of British Sign Language (BSL) and other European sign languages,
the history and sociolinguistics of BSL and the Deaf community,
the development of BSL in young children, and sign language and
the brain. In recent years she has begun to look specifically at
acquired and developmental sign language impairments, including
studies of
signers with learning disabilities and signers with stroke.
She co-authored "Sign Language: the
study of Deaf People and their Language" with Jim Kyle, and
"The Linguistics of BSL: an Introduction" (CUP) with Rachel
Sutton-Spence, which was the winner of the 1999 Deaf Nation Award
and 2000 BAAL Book Prize.
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