Jane Beal, PhD is a tenured, full professor and the chair of the English Department at the University of La Verne in southern California. She has written the academic monograph, John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon (ACMRS/​Brepols, 2012), and co-edited the festschrift, Translating the Past: Essays on Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn (ACMRS, 2012). She also has written The Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre (Routledge, 2017), co-authored and co-edited Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018), and edited and translated Pearl: A Middle English Edition and Modern English Translation (Broadview, 2020). She is currently editing Becoming the Pearl-Poet: Perceptions, Connections, Receptions (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming). She is the editor of two volumes of academic essays on the reception of major religious figures in the Middle Ages, Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception from Exodus to the Renaissance (Brill, 2014) and Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2019). She is currently working on new book about the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her writing on Tolkien appears in Journal of Tolkien Research, Mallorn, This Rough Magic, The Once and Future Classroom, and elsewhere. She also writes poetry, magical realist fiction, creative non-fiction, and music.