William Leap
William Leap is an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University and an affiliate professor in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University. He works in the overlapping fields of language and sexuality studies and queer linguistics, especially so, queer historical linguistics.
William Leap earned his bachelor's degree from Florida State University in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University in 1970. His dissertation advisor was George Trager.Contributions
Leap has been openly gay since he began teaching at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1970. Leap is a leading academic in Lavender linguistics and has been a recipient of the American Anthropological Association Ruth Benedict Award for publishing in Gay and Lesbian anthropology in 1996, 2003, and 2009. He founded the annual Lavender Languages & Linguistics conference in 1993 to coincide with the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. The conference continues to meet annually, and provides a focal point for international discussion of lgbtq-related language issues worldwide. The Lavender Language Institute, a summer program that Leap founded at Florida Atlantic University in 2017, offers training in queer linguistics to undergraduates, grad students, and others interested in language and sexuality studies. In 2012, Leap launched The Journal of Language and Sexuality with Heiko Motschenbacher. He has been a member of the American Anthropological Association's AIDS task force and co-chaired the AAA's Commission on Gay, Lesbian Bisexual, Trans and Queer Issues in Anthropology. He has done research among Native Americans of the Southwest U.S., South Africans, and Gay men in Washington, DC. He was one of the first researchers to study American Indian varieties of English in the same way that others had studied Black English, and he has been prominent in Indian language revitalization projects.
