Dr. David McNeill

David McNeill is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Harvard University, and Duke University. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Member of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, now Amsterdam. He is author of Hand and Mind (winner of the Lang Prize from the University of Chicago Press); Gesture and Thought; How Language Began; Why We Gesture; The Narrative Development of Young Children, coauthored with Elena Levy); Language is Gesture, and five other books. He has published 150 journal articles on various aspects of the psychology of language and the acquisition of language by children. He was educated in psychology at The University of California Berkeley, earning his AB with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1953, and his PhD in 1962, and carried out postdoctoral research at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard from 1962 to 1966. He is the remaining one of two Honorary Presidents for Life of the International Society for Gesture Studies; the other, Adam Kendon, passed away in 2024.