Asher is a Yale professor and author, who develops a romantic relationship with Paris Geller. The two meet through Richard Gilmore, because Asher and Richard were classmates at Yale. Despite the massive age difference, Paris and Asher had a serious relationship throughout Paris and Rory's freshman year of Yale. Asher dies of a heart attack two weeks before Rory and Paris's sophomore year of Yale begins. He was teaching a Shakespeare class in Oxford when he had the heart attack. He left Paris an eighteenth-century printing press, which she briefly stored in the common room she shared with Rory.