Michael Ward is an English literary critic and theologian. He works at the University of Oxford where he is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion. He is the author of the award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press).

Though based at Oxford in his native England, Dr Ward is also employed as Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas, teaching one course per semester as part of the online MA program in Christian Apologetics.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death (22 November 2013), Professor Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.  He is the co-editor of a volume of commemorative essays marking the anniversary, entitled C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner.

Michael Ward presented the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code, directed and produced by BAFTA-winning film-maker, Norman Stone.  He authored an accompanying book entitled The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens.

Michael was resident Warden of The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home, from 1996 to 1999.  He studied English at Oxford, Theology at Cambridge, and has a PhD in Divinity from St Andrews.  He was Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford (2012-2021).  He has been awarded honorary doctorates in Humane Letters (Hillsdale College, Michigan, 2015) and Sacred Theology (Thorneloe University, Ontario, 2021).

Dr Ward’s chief claim to fame, however, is that he handed a pair of X-ray spectacles to James Bond in the movie The World Is Not Enough. Here he is next to 007 and Q:

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