David Jasper

David Jasper is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he was for many years Professor of Theology and Literature. He has also taught in universities in China, Australia and the USA. He holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Durham and Uppsala. He has been an Anglican priest for almost 50 years. For most of that time, he has been licensed within the Scottish Episcopal Church and has served in a number of charges in south Glasgow during his years of teaching at the University. He was Canon Theologian of St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow from 2017–23. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His recent books include Heaven in Ordinary: Poetry and Religion in a Secular Age (2018) and (with Jeremy Smith) Reinventing Medieval Liturgy in Victorian England (2023).

David was a founder of the Conference on Literature and Religion at Durham University in 1980. Since then, a series of international meetings have been organised every other year by the organisation, providing a forum for the inter-disciplinary study of literature and theology in contemporary Europe. Jasper was Principal of St Chad’s College from 1989 to 1991, leaving to become Dean of Theology at Glasgow. His recent research has been into some of the earliest of Christian theologians, hermits and Desert theology.