[1] He spent his National Service (1950–53) at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich as an Instructor Lieutenant in History and English.
Nurser was a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Harvard Divinity School (1956–57), studying under the philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich.
[2] Nurser returned to Cambridge to become Dean of Trinity Hall (1961–68), and then became the first Warden of the new St Mark's Institute of Theology in Canberra, Australia (1968–74).
He left Lincoln in 1992, in the aftermath of the debacle of the Chapter's ruinously expensive exhibition of its Magna Carta at Expo 88 in Brisbane, Queensland.
[1] He was awarded the Albert C. Outler Prize by the American Society of Church History in 2005 for his study of the Christian origins of the United Nations Charter on human rights.