Before joining Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oliver was the Director of the Aquinas Institute and Fellow in Systematic Theology at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford. He has been a member of the Theology Faculty at the University of Oxford since 2020 and has taught theology in a range of academic and ecclesiastical contexts. 

He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford (under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward). His doctoral work outlined a semantic ontology for Christian dogmatics, in dialogue with the philosophy of Michael Polanyi. He specialises in systematic and historical theology, and twentieth-century dogmatics, especially the work of Karl Barth. Since 2017 he has been a Translation Fellow of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, working on an NEH funded project to bring Barth’s untranslated works to an English-speaking audience for the first time. 

Alongside his academic work, he has held a number of pastoral offices and responsibilities. Most recently he was principal investigator of a two-year Templeton-funded project on ‘Truth, Aquinas, and the Theological Turn in Continental Philosophy‘ (with Dr Daniel DeHaan). He has published in a number of journals and has two monographs forthcoming, one on the philosophical theology of M. Polanyi and the second “Why Aquinas Matters”  (Bloomsbury) on the relevance of the medieval theologian’s thought in a postmodern world.