Tom L. Humphries is a Deaf American academic, author, and lecturer whose work focuses on Deaf culture, deaf communication, and bilingual education. He is a longtime University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) scholar who coined the term “audism.” He is Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego, with affiliations in Communication and Education Studies.
Academic Career
Humphries introduced the term audism in an unpublished paper in 1975 and reiterated it in his doctoral dissertation in 1977. He earned a Ph.D. in Cross-Cultural Communication and Language Learning at Union Institute & University in 1977[1].
At UC San Diego, Humphries held a joint appointment in Communication and Education Studies and later served as Vice Chair in Education Studies. Over more than 15 years, he led the development of a teacher-preparation degree program for working with deaf children that applies bilingual, multimodal teaching practice in the classroom[2]. He is Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego[2][3].
Humphries’s writings include widely used books (often co-authored with Carol Padden) such as A Basic Course in American Sign Language (1980), Learning American Sign Language (1992), Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988), and Inside Deaf Culture (2004)[1].
Research Themes
Humphries’s scholarly interests include how Deaf people produce and circulate culture and how bilingual, multimodal classroom practices support language and literacy. His work (and co-authored work) has examined instructional strategies for linking American Sign Language (ASL) and English literacy and the implications of such strategies for teacher preparation[1][2].
Impact
Humphries’s coining of “audism” provided the field with a concise term for naming and analyzing attitudes and structures that privilege hearing and hearing behavior, anchoring decades of subsequent discussion in Deaf studies[1]. At UC San Diego, his leadership in bilingual, multimodal teacher preparation helped articulate and implement programmatic approaches that foreground ASL and Deaf cultural knowledge in the education of deaf children[2].
- Wikipedia contributors. (2025, May 22). Tom L. Humphries. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
- University of California San Diego, Department of Communication. (n.d.). Tom Humphries [Faculty emeritus profile].
- ResearchGate. (n.d.). Tom HUMPHRIES — Professor Emeritus — UCSD — Research profile.
