Michel DeGraff

Michel Anne Frederic DeGraff (born 1963) is a Haitian creolist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His scholarship focuses on Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation. He grew up in a middle-class family and attended a school where the instruction was in French. He felt that French was a hindrance at school, as not speaking it well caused complexes of inferiority among otherwise bright children. He developed an interest in linguistics during an internship at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1985, as a Summer Intern at AT&T Bell Laboratories' Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence department.

Academic career DeGraff is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy.

In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti. DeGraff believes that instruction in French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, hinders their creativity and their ability to excel.