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" Watch the Freeman Lecture presented by John Rickford.

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