James M. May, PhD

Biography: James M. May is professor of classics and Provost and Dean of the College at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, where he has taught since 1977, after finishing his doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. May received his BS Ed in Latin and English from Kent State University and his PhD in classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been the recipient of four NEH awards, the American Philological Association's Award for Excellence in the Teaching of the Classics, and The Sears-Roebuck Foundation Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award. He has served as Vice-President for Education for the American Philological Association and as Director of its Campus Advisory Service and is currently its Vice-President for Professional Matters. He has been the President of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and currently serves as the Association's official orator. He has published extensively in the fields of ancient rhetoric, pedagogy, and in particular Ciceronian oratory. He is coauthor (with Anne Groton) of Thirty-Eight Latin Stories (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, fifth edition, 1995), the author of Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), co-author (with Jakob Wisse) of Cicero: On the Ideal Orator (Oxford University Press, 2001), and editor of Brill's Companion to Cicero: Rhetoric and Oratory (Brill, 2002).