Associate Dean's Biography

Born and raised in Chicago, Dr. James Conley attended Hardey Preparatory School and Loyola Academy before enrolling at Georgetown University where he majored in English, rowed on the Georgetown crew, spent his Junior Year Abroad with the Gonzaga-in-Florence (Italy) Program, and graduated in 1966. He then studied at the Italian School of Middlebury College (MA, 1968) and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he specialized in epic and romance poetry, the Renaissance, and literary criticism. He received the Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1974.

From 1971-74 he taught at Gonzaga-in-Florence; in 1974 he moved to the Philadelphia area and taught part-time at Montgomery County Community College and at Villanova University. Having finished and defended a Ph.D. dissertation on Renaissance epic poetry, Dr. Conley in 1976 joined the English and Humanities faculty at Biscayne College (re-named St. Thomas University in 1984). He served as the Chairperson of the Faculty Forum in 1978-79, won the Thomas Sessa Award for Institutional Service in 1979, and was voted the Robert M. Sullivan Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1980. He helped to found the Biscayne College Honors Program in 1981-82, edited the SACS Institutional Self-Study for Re-Accreditation in 1982-83, and became Honors Program Director in 1984-85.

Dr. Conley has delivered papers at numerous conferences, including the Modern Language Association annual meeting; the Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Conference; the Milton Society Conference in Florence, Italy; the International Humanities Conference in Prato, Italy; and the Beijing Conference on Asian American Literature. He has published articles on “Petrarch and St. Augustine” and “Tasso and Milton” and has edited and translated a collection of essays by the Italian epic poet Torquato Tasso entitled Tasso’s Epic Theory. Dr. Conley has also participated in a number of Summer Institutes sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, including “Spenser and the Renaissance Epic” (Princeton, 1980), “The Romantics and Renaissance Literature” (the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 1983), “Columbus and the New World” (UCLA, 1989), and “Ariosto and Tasso” (Northwestern, 1990).

Elected Chairperson of the Department of Communication Arts, English and Humanities in 1992, Dr. Conley served in that capacity until 2004. Always supportive of study abroad experiences, he taught with the St.Thomas Summer in Spain Program in 1992 and the Study Abroad for the Earth Program in Italy in 1995; he directed Study Abroad for the Earth from 1999-2002. In 2002 he was elected to the National Board of Directors for Delta Epsilon Sigma, the Scholastic Honors Society for Catholic Colleges and Universities; and from 2004-2006 he served as the National President of Delta Epsilon Sigma. In 2007 Dr. Conley was first listed in Who’s Who in America.
Dr. Conley has two grown children and five gorgeous grandchildren. Jimbo, the oldest offspring, studied engineering at Georgia Tech, earned a Masters in Structural Engineering at the University of California San Diego, and now lives in San Diego with his wife and their twin two-year-old boys. Danielle was born at Mt. Sinai hospital, attended Pace High School, graduated as a Communication Arts major from St. Thomas in 1999, and landed a dream job with a publishing placement firm in New York City, adapting the skills developed as part of her St. Thomas University education; she is now married and living outside New York with her NYPD husband and their three children, ages 4, 2 and three months!

Dr. Conley loves to teach, whether it is composition or introduction to literature courses to first year students, literature surveys and upper level classes to English majors, business communications to adult learners like the police and fire rescue officers at the City of Miami Police Headquarters downtown, or most recently the diverse students enrolling in “blended courses” that combine face-to-face and online educational instruction. He passionately believes in education extending “beyond the classroom” and over the years has moderated Logos (the St. Thomas Yearbook), the St. Thomas Sentinel (the student newspaper), and the St. Thomas chapter of Delta Epsilon Sigma. He frequently attends St. Thomas sporting events, including soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball, softball and even an occasional tennis match or cross country meet; he equally supports Student Government events and often appears for the special activities of campus clubs and organizations. A product of Catholic schools, Dr. Conley recognizes the enormous importance of campus ministry in the life of the university and cherishes the opportunity to serve as Lector and Eucharistic Minister at daily and Sunday liturgies. Dr. Conley considers it a great gift and honor to have had a career as an educator here at St. Thomas University and looks forward to being Interim Dean of the Biscayne College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences as the university approaches its 50th anniversary!