Rate My Professor Lori Whynot

Lori Whynot, Professor of Interpreting and Director of the American Sign Language and Interpreting Education Program in Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, brings over three decades of professional experience as a sign language interpreter and translator. Her career includes freelance work in conference, healthcare, legal, and academic settings across the United States, Australia, Europe, and other regions since 1991. She joined Northeastern in January 2020, following her tenure as Assistant Professor in the Department of Interpretation and Translation at Gallaudet University from 2016 to 2019. Whynot also completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at Radboud University’s Department of Linguistics from 2018 to 2019 and held multiple sessional lecturing positions in Australian universities such as Macquarie University, Melbourne Polytechnic, RMIT University, and La Trobe University from 2012 to 2016. Earlier roles include part-time lecturing at Northeastern University from 1994 to 2005, in 2010, and 2019, as well as positions in deaf rehabilitation and case management in Massachusetts from 1987 to 1994.

Whynot holds a PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University in 2015, with a dissertation titled Assessing Comprehension of International Sign Lectures: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Factors; an MA with distinction in Intercultural Relations from Lesley University in 1998; and a BA in Psychology from Brandeis University in 1987. Her research specializations include cognitive and sociolinguistic aspects of sign language interpreting, multilingualism and sign language contact phenomena, corpus-informed and ethnographic research methods, consequence-based ethics, and healthcare interpreting. Key publications feature her book Understanding International Sign: A Sociolinguistic Study (Gallaudet University Press, 2016); the co-authored article “Insights from U.S. deaf patients: Interpreters’ presence and receptive skills matter in patient-centered communication care” (Journal of Interpretation, 2020); and forthcoming chapters such as “Signed language interpreting and translation: Implications of modality” in Introduction to Translation and Interpreting Studies (2022) and “Meeting the demands of sign language multilingualism: Interpreters’ plurilingual repertoires and translanguaging strategies” in Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2nd edition. She has received the Macquarie University International Research Excellence Scholarship (iMQRES, 2011), National Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf Mentorship Grant (2007), and Lesley University Outstanding Achievement Award (1998).