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Dr. Joseph C. Hill is a Deaf sociolinguist in American Sign Language (ASL), Deaf Studies, and interpreting. He is an assistant professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. Joseph Hill has participated in several research projects and contributed to many works about the variations of American Sign Language and Black Deaf history.

Background
Joseph C. Hill was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio by his family of hearing and deaf members. His mother is Hard-of-Hearing (HOH), his dad was hearing, and he had siblings that were Deaf and HOH as well.

Education
He graduated from high school and moved on to study at Miami University in Ohio. Hill majored in Systems Analysis and graduated with a BS in 2001. He was then accepted into Gallaudet University, in Washington D.C., for graduate school where he studied linguistics of American Sign Language. Dr. Hill received his masters and doctorate degrees in the linguistics of ASL and dedicates his degrees to researching Black ASL, how culture and language overlap, and language variations within Deaf Culture, as well as other cultures.

Career
During the summers of 2009 to 2012, Dr. Hill was an instructor in the Deaf Studies Department for Sienna School for Liberal Arts in Italy. During the fall and spring semesters of those years he was an Adjunct instructor in the Department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University; prior to those years, he also worked in the same position at Gallaudet from 2004 through 2007. In 2010, he was hired as an instructor for the Department of Specialized Educational Services in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. After his first year at the University of North Carolina, he was offered to be Assistant Professor and stayed in that position for four years before accepting the same position in the National Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2015. Now Dr. Hill is Co-Director of the Sign Language Laboratory in the Center of Cognition and Language and still holds his position as Assistant professor at NTID in Rochester Institute of Technology.

Research Interests
Joseph Hill contributed to and was a part of several research projects. Starting from 2004, he was research assistant for Susan Mathers (Gallaudet University) and other principal investigators on the Gesture and ASL Acquisition research project. They analyzed whether hearing signers’ gestural abilities assists them to build a better understanding of American Sign Language. In 2005 through 2007, Hill was student assistant for David Poeppel’s (University of Maryland) and Deborah Chen Pichler’s (Gallaudet University) research project, Repetition Priming in ASL Deaf Participants. They explored the lexical access in deaf ASL signers using magnetoencephalography (MEG). During that time, Joseph Hill was also research assistant to Dragana Barac-Cikoja's (Gallaudet University) research project, Visual Feedback Effect on ASL Signing (2006), which examined the effects of various visual conditions had on the visual and haptic feedback loops in ASL signers. The longest research project Hill was a part of is The History and Structure of Black ASL in the South, in 2007 and ended his research in 2011. He was research assistant to Carolyn McCaskill (Gallaudet University), Ceil Lucas (Gallaudet University), and Robert Bayley (University of California, Davis). The findings from this project were organized to be constructed into teaching materials and resources, which provides a description of the linguistic features that recognizes Black ASL as a distinct part of a whole that is American Sign Language and a chronicled history of the education of Black Deaf children. Then in 2012, Dr. Joseph Hill was Principal Investigator, along with Carolyn McCaskill, in his research project, Black Deaf Families, where he and McCaskill analyze the lived experiences of Black Deaf families through recorded interviews. Hill has used his degrees to research and present about Black Deaf people because he feels that it is his duty to do so, considering the lack of research in those fields.

Contributions/ Publications

 * Hill, J. (2012). Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
 * McCaskill, C., Lucas, C., Bayley, R., Hill, J. (2011). Hidden Treasure: The History and Structure of Black ASL. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
 * Lucas, C., Bayley, R., McCaskill, C., Hill, J. (2013). The Intersection of African American English and Black American Sign Language. International Journal of Bilingualism, 0 (0), 1-13.
 * Lucas, C., McCaskill, C., Bayley, R., Hill, J. (2015). Sociolinguistics: Black ASL. In P. Boudreault, G. Gertz, J.G. Golson (eds.), The Deaf Studies Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
 * Hill, J., McCaskill, C. (2016). Reflections on the Black ASL Project. Sign Language Studies, 17(1), 59-63.
 * Bayley, R., Hill, J., Lucas, C., McCaskill, C. (2016) Perceptions of Black American Sign Language. In E. Benson, B. Evans, and J. Stanford (eds.), Language Regard: Methods, Variation, and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.