Jens Martin Gurr has been Professor of British and Anglophone Literary and Cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2007. He studied English and German Philology at the University of Mannheim and received his doctorate from the University of Duisburg for his thesis Tristram Shandy and the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1999). His post-doctoral thesis The Human Soul as Battleground: Variations on Dualism and the Self in English Literature was published in 2003 (Heidelberg: Winter). Having worked in international management consulting for three years, he taught at the universities of Duisburg-Essen, Bamberg and Waterloo, Canada, before taking up his current position at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
His research interests include urban studies, 17th-21st-century British Literature as well  as contemporary American literature and Anglophone fiction. Since 2008, he has been director of the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Joint Center “Urban Systems”, in which over 70 researchers from all faculties engage in interdisciplinary urban research. Since 2013, he has been President of the Society for English Romanticism/Gesellschaft für englische Romantik. Recent publications include several co-edited volumes in the area of urban studies: EthniCities: Ethnic Identities and Metropolitan Cultures in the Americas (Trier: WVT and Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011), Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film (Trier: WVT and Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011), Romantic Cityscapes, vol. 12 of Studies in English Romanticism/Studien zur englischen Romantik (Trier: WVT, 2013) as well as Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2014).