Brentari received her PhD in
Linguistics from the
University of Chicago in 1990. Her dissertation, entitled
Theoretical Foundations of American Sign Language Phonology, was supervised by
John Goldsmith. She is the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the
University of Chicago. She held a position at
University of California-Davis, and then led the Sign Language program at
Purdue University before coming to the University of Chicago in 2011. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brentari's research interests address the sign language grammars of Deaf communities—how these languages emerge, and the degree of variation that exists among them. She has analyzed the formal, cognitive, and cultural dimensions that motivate the similarities and differences among these languages. Her work focuses on sign language structure as a way to better understand the flexibility of the human language capacity in constructing spoken and signed languages, as well as the effects of communication mode (or modality) on language. Brentari's scholarship focuses on the
phonology,
morphology, and
prosody of sign languages. Her current research has expanded to include analyses of a new protactile language. == Honors ==