Anna Lim, PhD ASL Linguistics & Deaf Studies Faculty
California State University Long Beach Immigrant linguist & cantadora educator interested in
postcolonial translation theory in sign language interpreting practices
Dr. Anna Lim (siya/she series) is a Filipino-Chinese multilingual deaf-of-deaf queer femme immigrant linguist mama & wife from Manila, Philippines. She, her family, and their two furbabies are currently based in Long Beach, California. She received her doctoral degree in Language and Literacy Education from Boston University with her research on the manifestations and ramifications of raciolinguistic ideologies in the experiences of immigrant deaf students of color in U.S. Deaf education system. She graduated from Ateneo de Manila University (Loyola Heights, Quezon City, Philippines) with a bachelor's degree in Psychology and from Gallaudet University (Washington, DC) with a master's degree (with honors) in Linguistics.
Her research interests encompass multilingualism of deaf people of color, cognitive linguistics in heritage language acquisition and learning, linguistic justice, Taglish linguistics, and Filipino history & culture education for deaf Filipinos. She conceived the framework deaf liminality to describe more expansively and with finer nuance the incredibly vast range and diversity of deaf lives and how such multitudes contained within what may be considered a singular experience is rooted in the theory of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977) which accounts for the immensely wide span of heterogeneity across deaf onto-epistemologies.
She is part of the core team of YOU FINISH EAT?, a platform for sharing resources on critical discourses about social justice by and for Asian and Pacific Islander communities via American Sign Language. In the future, she hopes to further the Philippine historical, cultural, and heritage language education of deaf Filipino immigrants and their children.
In her spare time, she plays the piano, reads tarot, and experiments with Filipino cooking.
