HFA - College of Humanities & Fine Arts view HFA submenu
About UMass Linguistics

Freeman Lecture

The Freeman lecture brings to campus a linguist whose work is of interest to a population outside of linguistics and academia.  The Freeman lectures honor department founder Donald C. Freeman and his wife Margaret H. Freeman and their contributions to Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Previous Speakers

2021: Emily Brewster "The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both" (Video and transcript)

2019:  Fernanda Ferreira "Getting a Head in Language Processing"

2017: John R. Rickford "Justice for Jeantel (and Trayvon): FIghting Dialect Prejudice in Courtrooms and Beyond" (click here to view)

2016: Raffaella Zanuttini "Discovering Grammatical Diversity in American English"

2015: Michel DeGraff "Kreyòl pale, kreyòl konprann: Power/Knowledge at the Crossroads of History, Linguistics & Education in Haiti"

2010: Didier Demolin "the Evolution of Speech and Language"

2008:  Larry Solan "Law, Language, & the Modular Mind"

2007: Geoff Nunberg "What Words Can Teach"

2005: Noam Chomsky "Biolinguistic explorations: Design Development, Evolution"

2004: Marc Hauser "Evolving a Linguistic Mind: From Grunts to Shakespeare"

2003: Steven Pinker