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People Faculty
Deborah Keller-Cohen
Deborah Keller-Cohen, dkc@umich.edu
Professor of Linguistics
Professor of Women's Studies
Professor of Education
Major research areas: Language and Aging; Language and Gender; Discourse Analysis
Associated research areas: Literacy, Conversational Analysis
Deborah Keller-Cohen is Professor of Linguistics, Women's Studies and Education. Professor Keller-Cohen has conducted research on a wide range of areas using ethnographic, experimental, archival and textual methodologies. Her work on literacy has examined both contemporary and historical American contexts with a focus on everyday understandings of reading, writing and speaking. She has examined literate practices in a credit union, how people understand and use the phone bill and how colonial Americans conceived of literacy. As a discourse analyst, her work has explored how people tell their life stories with particular emphasis on individual and gender-related differences. Her newest line of work is concerned with language and aging with a focus on the oldest old, those over 85. In particular she is examining the relationship between the maintenance of language skills and the nature of one's social environment and how gender, education and cognition affect that relationship.
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