Robert A. Leonard, Ph.D. is Professor of Linguistics, founding Director of the Graduate Program in Forensic Linguistics, and founding Director of the Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment and Strategic Analysis at Hofstra University in the NYC area. He also runs the unique new Forensic Linguistics Death Penalty Innocence Project.

 

Leonard's research focuses on forensic linguistics, sociolinguistic variation, and theoretical semantics of both linguistic and also non-linguistic meaning systems, e.g., the semantic analysis of food behavior systems.  

 

A Fulbright Fellow for his Ph.D. research, he received his B.A. with honors from Columbia College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia Graduate School, where he was a Faculty Fellow. At Columbia he was trained by William Diver and William Labov.

 

Leonard’s role in the emerging new specialty of forensic linguistics was the centerpiece of a 2012 New Yorker article, available here: http://www.hofstra.edu/academics/colleges/hclas/flp/

In that specialty, Leonard’s clients have included Apple, Inc., the Prime Minister of Canada, Facebook, the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, special units of the British and Canadian police, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice. Leonard’s testimony has been pivotal in investigating and prosecuting any number of cases, including the JonBenet Ramsey case, the triple homicide of the Coleman family in Illinois, and the Hummert murder. As The New York Times put it, "His consultation on the murder of Charlene Hummert, a 48-year-old Pennsylvania woman who was strangled in 2004, helped put her killer in prison. Mr. Leonard determined, through [analysis of] two letters of confession by a supposed stalker and a self-described serial killer, that the actual author was Ms. Hummert's spouse."

Leonard was recruited to Quantico by the FBI’s BAU—the Behavioral Analysis Unit (chronicled on TV’s Criminal Minds)—to train their agents in forensic linguistic techniques, and advise on their Communicated Threat Assessment Database (CTAD). 

 

The New Yorker calls him "A Sam Spade of semantics…one of the foremost language detectives in the country"

 

Newsday says “Think Professor Henry Higgins meets Sherlock Holmes”

 

TIME wrote he “opened for Jimi Hendrix [at Woodstock] …but music stardom held little appeal for Leonard, who traded limousines and gold-lamé suits to pursue studies in linguistics. Piling up a slew of advanced degrees (an M.A., an M.Phil. and a Ph.D.) from Columbia (including eight years of field research among tribes in East Africa), Leonard is now a professor and the director of Hofstra University’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment and Strategic Analysis. Brainiac Rating, on a scale of 1 to 11: 10” (Second to Queen’s Brian May, an Astrophysicist)

 

“At age 21, Mr. Leonard walked away from rock fame to pursue his real love: linguistics. Turns out to have been an inspired choice” added The New York Times.

 

Here is a link to a webpage that gives more details about forensic linguistics, as well as a video of Dr. Leonard and a link to a New Yorker article - http://www.hofstra.edu/academics/colleges/hclas/flp/

 

Also, a clip from a 2012 Nightline Leonard appeared on:

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/missing-ariz-girl-911-tapes-released-16354671

 

 

Ellen Contini-Morava is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia.  She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1983, with William Diver as her dissertation advisor.  She also worked with Erica García.  Her research has mostly focused on Swahili, first the tense-aspect-modality system, which was the topic of her book, Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic Categorization:  the case of negation and tense aspect, with special reference to Swahili (Berlin, de Gruyter 1989).  In later work she focused on noun classification, on which she published several papers, including an online one, Noun classification in Swahili (1995), as well as a more general paper co-authored with Marcin Kilarski of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland.    

Other publications include three co-edited volumes:  Meaning as explanation: advances in linguistic sign theory (co-edited with Barbara Sussman Goldberg, Mouton-de Gruyter 1995), Between grammar and lexicon  (co-edited with Yishai Tobin, John Benjamins 2000), and Cognitive and communicative approaches to linguistic analysis (co-edited with Robert S. Kirsner and Betsy Rodriguez-Bachiller, John Benjamins 2004).  More recently she has been collaborating with her colleague Eve Danziger on a study of the determiner system of Mopan, a Mayan language spoken in Belize and Guatemala.

 

The topic of Contini-Morava’s presentation at the CSLS 2014 Summer Institute will be teaching about “design features” of language, from communicative and human factor perspectives.

 

Alan Huffman is Professor of Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center and of Linguistics and College English as a Second Language in the English department of the NYC College of Technology of CUNY (“City Tech”), where he joined the faculty in 1985.  He received his Ph.D. in 1985 from Columbia University, under the mentorship of William Diver.  He received the Edward Sapir Award in Linguistics from the New York Academy of Sciences in 1986.  He is the author of two books:  The Categories of Grammar: French lui and le (1997: John Benjamins), and with Joseph Davis Language: Communication and Human Behavior. The Linguistic Essays of William Diver (2012: Brill), and of many articles and talks on Columbia School theory and analysis.  He was co-founder and first president of the Columbia School Linguistic Society.  He devised and teaches a course entitled “Instrumental Linguistic Meaning and Columbia-School Grammar” at the Graduate Center, and City Tech’s first linguistics course: “Language, Culture and Society”.  He has taught linguistics in several institutions at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

 

At the Institute, Prof. Huffman will be introducing the topic of the teaching of introductory linguistics and offering some perspectives based on his own experience.  He will also be offering a mini-course on writing systems and some remarks on the teaching of phonetics in the context of introductory linguistics.

 

In private life, Alan is a classical pianist, whose videos can be seen at www.youtube.com/chopinzee613, and cheerleader for a host of grandchildren, all of whom can outsmart him any day.

SPEAKERS.

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