HEIDI E. HAMILTON
Professor of Linguistics
Georgetown University
Research and Teaching Statement
Beginning with my doctoral dissertation work on language and
Alzheimer's disease, I have spent my life in linguistics exploring the interrelationships
between language and a variety of health care issues and contexts. My early
work on Alzheimer's disease, as most fully represented in my first book Conversations
with an Alzheimer's Patient: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Study (Cambridge
University Press, 1994), is generally recognized as the first work in the
area of language and Alzheimer's disease to depart from the clinical paradigm
with its experimentally-elicited data. By basing my analyses on the language
of open-ended, naturally-occurring conversations, it was my aim to understand
language disability as a human problem within multiple linguistic and social
contexts. Glimmers, a general interest book on these issues, was published
by RiverWood Books in August 2003.
My passion for understanding the mutual effects between language and human health - how language use affects health as well as how health affects language - has encouraged me to reach across disciplines, both to the scholarly literature and to practitioners. Such collaborations have included work with speech and language pathologists in the Defense Head Injury Project at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.; with physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators in an investigation of professional communication issues within Georgetown University Medical Center (the "Hospitalk" project); with Georgetown Medical Center's genetic counselors in an examination of the discourse of such counseling; and with the Interdisciplinary Team on Health Literacy at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. In addition to these projects, I also teach discourse analysis and sociolinguistics at medical and nursing conferences; have served since 1999 as a linguistics consultant on more than 50 studies with CommonHealth LP, a health care communications company; serve regularly as advisor to health professional recipients of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and am on the board of editors of the journal Communication & Medicine.
To illuminate some of the issues involved in such cross-disciplinary work and to promote discussions on real-world applications of linguistics, I co-organized the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics with my colleague, Dr. James E. Alatis, on the topic of "Language, Linguistics, and the Professions: Education, Journalism, Law, Medicine, and Technology" in May 2000. The volume of selected papers presented at this Round Table was published by Georgetown University Press in May 2002. Other cross-disciplinary projects include my single-authored Doing Discourse Analysis across Disciplines to be published by Oxford University Press and Genetic Counseling as Discourse (co-authored with counselors Benkendorf and Prince) to be used in board-certified Master's programs in genetic counseling across the United States. As I have carried out this work, I have consistently sought to relate it back to the students in Georgetown's Department of Linguistics, either in the form of research groups or integrated into my coursework. Over my eighteen years at Georgetown, I have specialized in teaching graduate courses in discourse analysis, ranging from basic-level courses on the analysis of narrative and conversation to higher-level courses and doctoral seminars exploring life stories, intertextuality, written discourse, language and aging, and medical discourse.
Recent awards include Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistics in Innsbruck, Austria and DAAD Gastdozentin in Berlin, Germany. For the past thirty-plus summers, I have taught German and carried out research at the K-12 language and cultural immersion programs of Concordia Language Villages in northern Minnesota, where I am Senior Researcher.
Last update: September 24, 2008