Dr. Sara Stinchfield Hawk
"To hundreds of persons in the Association and outside of it, Sara Stinchfield Hawk represents what is speech correction in its finest and deepest sense."
- Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, March 1954
Dr. Sara Stinchfield Hawk was born in 1885 in Auburn, Maine. She received a diploma from the Curry School of Expression in Boston in 1909; a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1914; an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1920 and a Ph.D. in Speech from the University of Wisconsin in 1922. While working as an assistant in the speech department at the University of Wisconsin from 1920-1922, she earned the first Ph.D. ever awarded in the field of speech from the newly formed doctoral program at the university under Dr. Smiley Blanton. Dr. Blanton served as Hawk’s thesis advisor whose dissertation was on the “Formulation and Standardization of a Series of Graded Speech Tests.” After receiving her doctoral degree, Dr. Hawk became an Associate Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts where she taught speech correction from 1922-1932. In 1932, she moved to Los Angeles to become a lecturer at the University of Southern California.