Robert Frederick Panara, pioneer of Deaf Studies Died

Robert Frederick Panara, the poineer of deaf studies died in Rochester, US on 20 July 2104 due to heart ailments. He was 94.

Panara was a writer, a poet, a professor who later went on to become the first deaf teacher within the mainstream Higher Education in America.

As a Shakespearean scholar, he helped translate into sign language Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello.

His wife Shirley Fischer was also deaf and they communicated in sign, they used sign and speech to talk to their son, who could hear.

About Robert Frederick Panara

•    In 1965, he helped found America's first Technical college for the deaf, National Technical Institute for Deaf (NTID). NTID was created by an act of US Congress and is a part of the Rochester Institute of Technology.
•    In the 1960s, Panara helped found the Connecticut-based National Theatre of the Deaf, which remains a venerable company.
•    In 1948, Panara became the first deaf person to receive a Master's degree in English from New York University
•    He graduated from Gallaudet Institute in 1945
•    Robert Frederick Panara, the son of Italian immigrants, was born 8 July 1920 in the Bronx.

Some Books and Poetry written by Panara

Poem: On His Deafness (1946) and On His Deafness and Other Melodies Unheard (1997)
Books: The Silent Muse: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry by the Deaf (1960) and Great Deaf Americans

Teaching from the Heart and Soul is the biography on Panara written by Harry Lang in 2007.

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