The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag talk given by Stephen Chrisomalis (Professor, Linguistic Anthropology) on the topic of "Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee: Language, Values, and Freedom in Detroit and Beyond"

Abstract: The linguist Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee (1905-1975) worked at the Merrill Palmer School in Detroit (now MPSI at Wayne State) from 1953 to 1959, resulting in her 1959 major collection of essays, Freedom and Culture. Although her work spanned linguistic relativity (the ‘Sapir-Whorf’ hypothesis), media studies, cybernetics, ethics, home economics, and child development, Lee remains understudied today. Using archival and textual evidence, I trace her career trajectory to Detroit and beyond, and her networks of influence including Margaret Mead, Abraham Maslow, and Marshall McLuhan. A humanist in an era of increasing scientism, a transdisciplinary scholar in a specializing field, and a researcher uncomfortable with her own success, Dorothy Lee’s impact on multiple fields over many decades marks her as a vitally important, underappreciated linguistic anthropologist.