Professor Stephen May

Professor Stephen May is a Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) in the Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Director of the cross-faculty and interdisciplinary Master of Regional Development program at the University of Auckland. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and Taiyuan University of Technology, China.

Professor Stephen May is an international authority on language rights, language policy, language revitalisation, language education (especially, Indigenous, bilingual, and multilingual education), critical multiculturalism, and the "multilingual turn". To date, he has published 27 books and over 100 articles and chapters in these areas and since 2022 has been named in the top two percent of scientists globally in the field of language education in Stanford University's citation index. He is the editor-in-chief of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed. Springer, 2017) and a Founding Editor of the international, interdisciplinary journal, Ethnicities.

In 2023, Professor May received the Royal Society of New Zealand, Te Apārangi, Mason Durie Medal awarded to New Zealand's pre-eminent social scientist, and in 2018, he was awarded the McKenzie Award by the New Zealand Association of Educational Research (NZARE), the preeminent award for educational research in New Zealand. In 2015 he became an American Educational Research Association (AERA) fellow and was elected a Te Apārangi/Royal Society of New Zealand Fellow (FRSNZ) in 2016.

In 2008, Professor May was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, based at Arizona State University and City University New York, and in 2016 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian. From 2005 to 2015, he was an Associate Editor of Language Policy. He began his professional career as a secondary teacher of English and ESL in New Zealand and has subsequently taught in universities in New Zealand, Britain, USA, and Canada. The latter include the Sociology Department of the University of Bristol, UK, where he remains affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, and the University of Waikato, where he was a Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education.