Dennis Cokely is currently the Director of the ASL Program and the Interim Chair of the Modern Languages Department. Dennis is internationally known as a consultant and lecturer. For 15 years Dennis worked in various positions at Gallaudet University (as a teacher of elementary and high school students, an administrator, an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School, and as a Research Associate in the Linguistics Research Lab where he worked with William Stokoe). From 1983 through 1987 he served as the president of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) and was instrumental in revising the RID's certification and testing program.

Dennis received his doctorate in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University and also has a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics. His publications include numerous articles, a series of five textbooks on American Sign Language (generally known as "The Green Books") which he co-authored with Charlotte Baker-Shenk, Sign Language Interpreters and Interpreting and Interpretation which he edited and A Sociolinguistic Model which has been translated into German and excerpted into Swedish and Japanese.