Schürer studied geography and history as an undergraduate before receiving his PhD from the University of London. He is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure at the University of Cambridge, and then taught at the University of Essex, where he is now an honorary professor. Schürer was the UK representative, on behalf of the Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure working group in Social Science and Humanities. In 2009, he received a grant from the ESRC to create standardised version of the censuses for Great Britain for 1851 to 1911. Known as the Integrated Census Microdata project, the result was one of the largest digital historical data resources in the world. He served as president of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives. Prior to joining the University of Leicester, he served as the director of the UK Data Archive from 2000 to 2010. He is currently a senior member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and is chair of the British Library's EThOS advisory committee, having previously served as a member of the British Library’s Advisory Council and the Research Libraries Network Advisory Committee.
Schürer is most well known for his genealogical research to find descendants of the immediate relatives of King Richard III, whose remains were found in a Leicester carpark in 2012. Schürer's research was instrumental in identifying the remains as that of the king, who was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Among the royal descendants Schürer discovered is English actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who read a poem at Richard III's reburial on 26 March 2015, and Conrad Penny, whose ancestor William Stanley led the charge that ended with Richard III being hacked to death in 1485. Penny is also descended from Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence on the Plantagenet side. Prior to Richard III's reburial, the descendants of at least 20 families who fought at the Battle of Bosworth, as traced by Schürer, met together and visited the battlefield. Some of them traveled from Australia, Canada and South Africa. Their ancestors include Sir John Babington of Dethick, Derbyshire, sheriff of Derby and Nottingham and is reported to have fought for Richard's side; Sir Reginald Bray from Worcester, who is believed to have discovered the king's crown on a hawthorn bush on the battlefield; Marmaduke Constable, who survived multiple battles only to die after choking on a frog while drinking water; Simon Digby, who was subsequently knighted and given the manor of Coleshill, Warwickshire for his part in the battle; Samuel Spriggs from Leicestershire, believed to be the Esquire of the Body; John Hardwick, who advised Henry Tudor on the best battle positions based on his knowledge of the terrain and thus credited as "the architect of Richard's defeat;" Thomas Iden who fought for the House of Lancaster and later served as the Sheriff of Kent in 1500. In 2014, Schürer and the other researchers—dubbed "The Grey Friars Research Team"—published a book about the discovery, exhumation and identification of Richard III, The Bones of a King: Richard III Rediscovered.
Awards
Schürer won the 2011 Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Service to the Social Sciences, presented by the ICPSR.
