Born 1936 in Brooklyn, Harlan Lane attended Columbia University, taking a BS and MS in psychology in 1958 and then going on to Harvard University, where he studied with B. F. Skinner and received his Ph.D. He was a professor at the University of Michigan and then transferred to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received a doctorate in linguistics. In 1973, Dr. Lane returned to the U.S., where he was a visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego. He then relocated to Boston to join the faculty at Northeastern University, where he founded their Center of Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language.

Dr. Lane’s first book related to deaf culture was The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1976), for which he extensively researched the history of the early teacher of the deaf Jean-Marc Itard. This led him to research other teachers of the deaf and write When the Mind Hears (1984), a mainstream and critical success about the history of deaf education.

Following that, Dr. Lane wrote or co-written several books on deaf history, genealogy, and culture, including A Journey into the Deaf-World (1996, with Robert Hoffmeister and Ben Bahan), The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (1999), A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr. (2004), and The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (2011, with Ulf Hedberg and Richard Pillard).

Among other honors, Dr. Lane received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, a Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of the Deaf, an Award of Merit from the World Federation of the Deaf, and was named a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the government of France.

Dr. Lane passed away in 2019.