Jens Zimmermann: Director

Canada Research Professor for Interpretation, Religion, and Culture at Trinity Western University, Visiting Professor for Philosophy, Literature, and Theology at Regent College. Visiting Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Oxford, Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford.

BA, MA, PhD (UBC), PhD (Johannes Gutenberg) 

Dr. Jens Zimmermann was born and raised in Germany. He studied at the University of British Columbia, earning his first Ph.D in Comparative Literature in 1997. He taught at UBC briefly before moving on to Trinity Western, where he has been for the past seventeen years, holding the Canada Research Chair of Interpretation, Religion and Culture from 2006-2016.

In 2010, he earned a second Ph.D in Philosophy from the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He was awarded a research fellowship at Cambridge University (Trinity Hall) for 2016-17, and appointed Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Literature and Theology at Regent College in 2016. He is currently a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Oxford, and Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford.

His main intellectual interests are anthropology and epistemology. He has pursued these two central questions across a broad range of interests that include theological anthropology, hermeneutics, European literature, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Urs von Balthasar. His published works include the monographs Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), and the collection Reimagining The Sacred: Debating God with Richard Kearney, co-edited with Richard Kearney (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016).