Francis Oakley

Who is Francis Oakley?

Francis Christopher Oakley, Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideas at Williams College; President Emeritus of the College and of the American Council of Learned Societies, New York. Born in England in 1931 of Irish immigrant parents and raised in Liverpool, Professor has vivid memories of the World War II wartime Blitz there and, while his elementary school was closed because of the bombing, of being homeschooled by his mother whose own education in a tiny village on the edge of Connemare had ended at the age of 14. That notwithstanding, she proved to be an effective, dedicated and demanding teacher and he was able to go on, first to Jesuit academic high school in Liverpool and then, via that route, to Oxford, where he graduated in 1953 with First Class Honours in the Honours School of Modern History. Awarded a Goldsmiths' Company's Commonwealth Traveling Research Scholarship, he spent the next two years studying Latin Palaeography and the history of Medieval Philosophy.

Oakley's graduate studies were interrupted by the need to return to England to serve for two years in the British Army, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals and was attached to the Commonwealth Communications Army Network. Having decided to return to North America, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Yale University in 1959 and spent the next two years teaching in the Yale History Department before taking up a similar position in the history department of Williams College in Massachusetts. there, for forty years, he taught medieval and early-modern history for the history department, as well as courses in the Interdepartmental History of Ideas major and in the Environmental Studies Program until his retirement from the faculty in 2002.