Diane Brentari joined the department at Hebrew University in 2019 as Distinguished Visiting Professor, and is also the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Gesture Sign and Language at the University of Chicago.

Her research addresses the extent to which the modality of a language—auditory, visual, or tactile—has an effect on language structure, on variation among languages, and on the flexibility of the human language capacity. This work focuses primarily on sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. She has written two books, edited five volumes, and published over 100 articles or book chapters, on these and other themes.

Her research has expanded to include language emergence. Her current projects include analyses of the emergence of sign languages, as well as a new protactile language that is emerging in DeafBlind communities in the USA, which uses the modalities of proprioception and touch. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship (2020-2021) and by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation of the United States (2001- present). Brentari is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.