Jens Zimmermann: Director

J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent COllege/UBC. Canada Research Chair for Interpretation, Religion, and Culture (2006-16). Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford.

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

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 held 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, a British Academy Visiting Fellowship from 2018-19 at the University of Oxford (Christ Church), and appointed to the J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College in 2020. He is currently a Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford.

His main intellectual interests are philosophical anthropology and epistemology, of who we are and how we know. He has pursued these two central questions across a broad range of interests that include theological anthropology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, European literature, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Urs von Balthasar. His published works include the monographs Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanism (O.U.P. 2019), Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (O.U.P., 2015), Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture (O.U.P, 2012), and the collection Reimagining The Sacred: Debating God with Richard Kearney, co-edited with Richard Kearney (Columbia University Press, 2016).