I'm a professor at Alma College, where I teach physics, run our campus planetarium, and sometimes get the chance to teach classes that connect to my lifelong love of SFF literature. For years, I was probably better known in the online Tolkien community than for my physics research , and when I teach my course on The Lord of the Rings, my somewhat science-flavored approach to studying Middle-earth is a great complement to my co-instructor's background in English literature. (I created the Tolkien (Usenet) Newsgroups FAQ and the Tolkien Meta-FAQ and wrote a well-regarded essay on Tom Bombadil, among other things.) My seminar courses on time travel draw on topics from metaphysics, literature, history, ethics, and more, as well as visual depictions of space-time that let students work through detailed scenarios in Einstein's relativity without equations. I love that I have a career where I get paid to share my enthusiasm about nerdy topics with a wide range of people.