Jens Martin Gurr is co-speaker of the Scripts research group. He has been Chair of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2007. Since 2008, he has been speaker of the University of Duisburg-Essen's interdisciplinary Joint Center Urban Systems, one of the university's four flagship research areas. Since 2017, he has been one of three Coordinators of the Competence Field "Metropolitan Research" in the University Alliance Ruhr.

His research fields include literary and cultural urban studies (more specifically literary models of urban complexity, narratives in planning, urban imaginaries in postindustrial regions), contemporary Anglophone fiction, literary and cultural history, 17th- and 18th-century British Literature as well as British Romanticism. He is the author of The Human Soul as Battleground: Variations on Dualism and the Self in English Literature from Chaucer to Joyce (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003) and of Tristram Shandy and the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1999). Co-edited volumes include Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), Romantic Cityscapes (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013), Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film (Trier: WVT/ Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011) and EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the Americas (Trier: WVT/ Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011).

His recent monograph Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City (Routledge, 2020) is available through open access here.

For further information on his research and academic functions click here.

Contact: jens.gurr@uni-due.de