Teresa Blankmeyer Burke
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is a Professor of Philosophy at Gallaudet University. She is the first signing deaf woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the world, as well as the first deaf person to receive a PhD in philosophy at the University of New Mexico.Her work primarily focuses on deaf philosophy (the intersection of philosophy and Deaf studies) and bioethics. Her primary interests lay in areas such as virtue ethics, moral justification, and the ethics of sign-language interpreting. Since the use of American Sign Language to discuss topics in philosophy is a relatively new development, Burke grappled with the lack of an existing philosophical lexicon in ASL and the philosophical considerations as to what the development of that lexicon could or should look like.