Regius Professor of Divinity: Professor Ben Quash

The Faculty of Divinity is delighted to welcome the election of Professor Ben Quash as the next Regius Professor of Divinity. He will be joining the Faculty at the start of October 2026.

Ben Quash is currently Professor of Christianity & the Arts at King’s College London, where he directs the Centre for Arts & the Sacred (ASK) and runs the MA in Theology, Bible & the Arts in collaboration with the National Gallery, both of which he established during his 18 years at King’s.

Professor Quash’s election to the Regius Chair marks a return to Cambridge, which has played a central role in his personal and intellectual formation ever since he read English as an undergraduate at Peterhouse in the late 1980s. In subsequent years, and with the help of a second Cambridge degree in Theology, he acquired an unusually wide experience of the theological ‘ecology’ of Cambridge, having been a Church of England ordinand at Westcott House, a curate in a city centre parish, Tutor in Doctrine at Wesley House, Chaplain and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and finally Dean and Fellow of Peterhouse. There are therefore very few areas of Cambridge’s distributed network of theological energies of which he does not have direct experience and knowledge.

He supervised, lectured and ran various academic research projects in the Faculty of Divinity before his departure for KCL in 2007. As the first academic convenor of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, he was instrumental in securing funding for the project’s development phase, co-authored the Academic Profile on the basis of which CIP secured approval at both Faculty and University levels for its long-term future, and helped lay the foundations at an audience with HM Sultan Qaboos in Oman for the eventual endowment of the Sultan Qaboos Chair.

Professor Quash is Canon Theologian of both Coventry and Bradford Cathedrals. He is General Editor of The Visual Commentary on Scripture (TheVCS.org), an ambitious online open-access resource to which hundreds of international scholars in Theology, Biblical Studies, and Art History have contributed. This high-impact work has garnered significant international press coverage, including in The Tablet, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Art Newspaper (as well as its Italian equivalent, Il Giornale dell’Arte), and First Things. He is author or co-author of five books (with a sixth in press), including Found Theology: History, Imagination, and the Holy Spirit (T&T Clark, 2013), and editor, or co-editor, of five more, including Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts (Brepols, 2024).

Professor Quash writes:

It is a deep joy, as well as a singular honour, to have been elected to the Regius Chair of Divinity, and to be returning to my alma mater.  I am committed to maintaining and strengthening my subject in Cambridge, as well as nationally, and internationally; to fostering the continued deep engagement of Christian Theology with questions of meaning, beauty, and public responsibility; and to widening its conversation with other religious traditions, and with major public institutions.

My theological work is at its liveliest and most productive when it has opportunities to converse with other disciplines in the shared exploration of fundamental questions. For this reason I am especially excited at the opportunities Cambridge affords for forging links between Theology and neighbouring subject areas. Such relationships at their best (combining intellectual rigour with wide public appeal) will contribute to the visibility, buoyancy, and growth of the Arts and Humanities at all levels of study.