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Katharine May Edwards

American classics professor

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ108481432 ↗
Source-derived summary

Katharine May Edwards (May 10, 1862 – May 21, 1952) was an American college professor and classicist.

Early life

Edwards was born in Cortland, New York, the daughter of Timothy Edwards and Hulda Ann Uptegrove Edwards. She earned a bachelor's degree at Cornell University in 1888. She had a fellowship in Greek at Bryn Mawr College from 1888 to 1889, and completed doctoral studies at Cornell in 1895. Later in life she was president of the Cornell Women's Club of Boston.

Career

Edwards taught Greek and comparative philology at Wellesley College from 1889 until her retirement in 1928. She was president of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter in Massachusetts, and an active member of the American Philological Association. She was vice-president of the Wellesley Golf Club.

Edwards was a member of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for thirty years, from 1922 to 1952, and a member of the executive committee from 1922 to 1927. After she retired from Wellesley, she catalogued over 10,000 coins found in the excavations at Corinth.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Katharine May Edwards” as american classics professor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Katharine, Edwards and American.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1862, 1952, 1888, 1889—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1862-05-10. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Katharine, Edwards and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Katharine May Edwards”, the useful work is to connect “american classics professor” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108481432. VIAF identifies the subject as 190759138. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1862, 1952, 1888 and 1889.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Katharine May Edwards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.