David Coplowe: Academic Biography

After the eleven plus and Grammar School I went to Liverpool University from 1963 to 1966 to study Engineering but never sat my finals. After various jobs and a career in the computer industry I retired in 1999.

In 2006 I started to dabble in OU courses to keep my brain active without any real intention of taking a degree.

I decided to attend the OU summer school in Caen to polish my French language skills and with my science background I took what I thought would be easy short courses: S197 ‘How the Universe works’ and MST121 ‘Using mathematics’. I could not have been more wrong; there are no ‘easy’ courses at the OU!

I had an amazing history teacher at school and having always been attracted to the history of the Roman period and early Christianity as well as WW1 so I decided on an open degree since none of the pure history degrees matched my interests.

I studied the following modules:

LXR122

A103 ‘An introduction to the humanities’

A217 ‘Introducing religions’

A297 ‘Reading classical Latin’

AA309 ‘Culture, identity and power in the Roman empire’

AA307 ‘Religion in history: conflict, conversion and coexistence’

AA312 ‘Total war and social change: Europe 1914-1955’.

In 2012 I was awarded an upper second class open BA degree.

I decided to take a full time MA and obtained a place at Durham University in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in 2013 which allowed me to pursue my interest in Judaism, early Christianity and the Roman Empire from a religious and historical perspective.

I gained an MA with merit in 2015 with a dissertation on the political triggers that contributed to the separation of Christianity from Judaism in the 1st century AD.

For interest in 2016 I studied A340 ‘The Roman Empire’ and entered an essay for the Kassman prize which was awarded joint 2nd place.

I am currently trying to find a suitable topic for a possible doctoral study.