Norbert Schürer (MA/​Staatsexamen, Free University Berlin; PhD, Duke University) is a Professor in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach. His teaching and research have focused mostly on eighteenth-century British literature, Anglophone postcolonial literature, women’s writing, literary theory, and book history. His publications include British Encounters with India, 1750 – 1830 (with Tim Keirn, 2011), Charlotte Lennox (2012), and Berlin (2014). He teaches a major authors class on J.R.R. Tolkien and has presented papers at various Tolkien conferences in the UK and Germany.