Ceil Lucas

Ceil (Kovac) Lucas (born March 19, 1951) is an American linguist and a professor emerita of Gallaudet University, best known for her research on American Sign Language.

Early life and education
Lucas was born in the United States but raised from ages five through twenty-one in Guatemala City and in Rome, Italy.

Lucas studied at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and received her BA in French and art history. Later, she earned her M.S. and PhD (1980) in linguistics from Georgetown University. (She also holds an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.)

Career
In 1973, Lucas started teaching Italian and continues to do so.

Lucas began teaching at Gallaudet University in 1981 and, alongside Robert Johnson and Scott Liddell, was one of the inaugural faculty to teach in the university's new linguistics graduate program. Lucas was a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University until her retirement in 2014.

During her tenure at Gallaudet, Lucas served as principal investigator on two research projects in the field of sign language linguistics. The first of these was the large-scale project Sociolinguistic Variation In ASL (funded by the National Science Foundation Grant Numbers: SBR 9310116, SBR 9709522).The results of this study are summarized in the book Sociolinguistic Variation In ASL (Lucas et al. 2001). (Results of its pilot study are discussed in the introductory chapter of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Lucas 1995).) The second project became titled The History and Structure of Black ASL (funded by The Spencer Foundation and NSF, Grant Numbers: BCS-0813736, DRL-0936085). The results of this study are summarized in the book The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (McCaskill et al. 2011).

Honors
Lucas is currently the editor of Sign Language Studies at Gallaudet University Press, a position she's held since 2009.

In 2022, Lucas was one of the recipients of the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public award. In 2023, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.