MACON – Dr. Bryan J. Whitfield, associate professor of religion in Mercer University’s College of Liberal Arts and director of the Great Books Program, was recently selected as a 2019 Governor’s Teaching Fellow.
Dr. Whitfield will represent Mercer among a select group of faculty from institutions of higher education across the state during the fellows program’s intensive summer symposium May 13-17 and 20-24 at the University of Georgia.
“I am very pleased that Dr. Whitfield was selected as a Governor’s Teaching Fellow for 2019,” said Dr. Anita Olson Gustafson, dean of the College of Liberal Arts. “His selection will allow him to interact with a community of teachers and scholars from across Georgia, bringing new ideas to the classroom and contributing his own notions of teaching excellence to group discussions.”
A native of Smyrna, Dr. Whitfield earned his undergraduate degree, with majors in comparative literature, French and mathematics, from the University of Georgia. He obtained graduate degrees in theology from Yale Divinity School, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Indiana University, before pursuing further graduate work at Duke University and completing his Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University.
Dr. Whitfield is the author of Joshua Traditions and the Argument of Hebrews 3 and 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013) and writes for Working Preacher.
Before joining Mercer’s faculty in 2002, he taught at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and Columbia Theological Seminary. During the spring semester of 2014, he served as visiting research professor of New Testament at Johannes Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
The Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program was established by the late Zell Miller, governor of Georgia from 1991-1999, to provide Georgia’s higher education faculty with expanded opportunities for developing important teaching skills. The program is offered through the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
