Joseph Hill is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University. He was born and raised in Cincinnati, OH with the family of deaf and hard-of-hearing siblings and a hard-of-hearing mother. On December 2001, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Systems Analysis from Miami University in Oxford. He began graduate studies in Linguistics at Gallaudet University in 2002. He graduated with a master's degree in 2004 and is currently completing his doctoral dissertation entitled "Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community."