Dr. Jonathan Chilcote Receives Prestigious Fulbright Award to Teach Abroad
November 5, 2025 | 1-2 min read
Jonathan Chilcote, PhD (’02), is taking his passion for history across the globe. Now in his tenth year on faculty at Florida College, Dr. Chilcote is gearing up for an unforgettable spring semester teaching abroad in the Slovak Republic.
“This is a fantastic opportunity, and I’ve always dreamed of teaching overseas,” he said. “This came together in a really fortunate way, and everyone over there has already been really great.”
After receiving his associate’s degree from FC, Dr. Chilcote earned bachelors’ degrees in both history and economics from the University of South Florida and his master’s degree in history from Western Kentucky University. In 2009, he accepted an offer from (former FC history chair) Brian Crispell, PhD, to serve as an adjunct professor and began his doctoral work in 2011. Today, he teaches a myriad of courses including Western Civilization, US History and US Foreign Relations, among others.
“Students at FC have such a sense of personal responsibility,” he noted. “If they don’t do their best work, they’ll apologize, which isn’t something I’d experienced before. While their academic work isn’t a reflection of their spiritual health, they want to please God in their work, and I appreciate that. It’s a sense of responsibility and work ethic that’s rooted in their upbringing and faith.”
In 2025 Dr. Chilcote received the prestigious Fulbright award from the US State Department’s Academic Cultural Exchange Program and will take sabbatical as he and his family experience life in a mountainous university town of 16,000 students. He hopes to share the same message in Central Europe that he does with students at FC.
“I want them to see history not as a story about dead people, but people who made the world around us and ultimately influenced us,” he explained. “It’s about how the past influenced the present, whether that’s the growth of democracy and technology or where last names come from. My goal is always to get students to understand and appreciate that they’re standing on the shoulders of previous generations and that they have the same responsibility to the generations after them.”