News: Watson Heads to England

CCU Professor Heads to England for an Honorary Fellowship

Colorado Christian University (CCU) Professor of History Dr. William Watson has been formally invited to teach at England's Oxford Brookes University this coming summer as a visiting fellow with the school's Institute for Historical and Cultural Research. Dr. Watson was nominated for the fellowship by Dr. William Gibson, an ecclesiastical (church) history professor at Oxford Brookes. The two historians met in 2005 during a University of California-Irvine panel discussion on eighteenth century Anglicanism, after Gibson had cited Dr. Watson's work in a book he wrote in 2004.

During the fellowship, Dr. Watson will participate in the university's second International Colloquium on Ecclesiastical History and will also sit in on a public panel discussion on the topic of intelligent design. In addition to conducting research for his next academic paper, Dr. Watson -- whose most recent paper covered the Church of England's reaction to the Scientific Revolution -- will lecture to graduate students on the subject of 17th-18th century English ecclesiastical history.

Among other degrees, Dr. Watson holds a Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from the University of California-Riverside and a Master of Divinity degree (church history emphasis) from Talbot Theological Seminary. He has studied at London's Institute for Historical Research, UCLA's Summer Institute of Economic Education, and at the Military Intelligence School at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas. He has been on the CCU faculty since 1996 and has taught as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Moldova State University in Eastern Europe.

"I feel honored to participate in this program and to represent my Lord and university in a place as respected as Oxford," stated Dr. Watson, who looks forward during his fellowship to also exploring faith issues within the British higher education system.

A public university, Oxford Brookes was founded in 1992 by former University of Oxford academics, and its history department is widely regarded for quality in research. The school dates back to Oxford Polytechnic (est. 1970) and Oxford School of Art (est. 1865).

"Colorado Christian University is proud that Professor Watson is gaining international recognition. He is extremely popular with our students and I predict he will be very well received at Oxford Brookes University," commented CCU President Bill Armstrong. "Bill Watson is not only a scholar; he knows how to strongly connect with students. He is an outstanding teacher."