Project Narrative

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Sarah Copland discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s 2005 short story, “ohtakemehomelord.com.” Sarah Copland is Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada and a former Visiting Scholar at Project Narrative. Copland works on literary modernism and on narrative theory, with particular attention to rhetorical narratology. Copland has published important essays on modernist prefaces, on the form of the short story, on politics and form, and on narrative ethics. Jim Phelan worked with Copland on her essay, “The Ideal Narratee and the Rhetorical Model of Audiences.”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Lindsay Holmgren discuss Ursula Le Guin’s 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Lindsay Holmgren is an Associate Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, where she also directs the Laidley Centre for Business Ethics and Equity. Holmgren is a Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and she currently serves the society, along with Dan Punday, as Conference Liaison. Holmgren has published on a variety of issues of narrative studies, including work on narrative telepathy in late 19th and early 20th century Anglo-American fiction and on metalepsis. Holmgren has also contributed to conversations in narrative medicine and especially in narrative and economics.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Rita Charon discuss George Saunders’ short story, “Puppy.” Rita Charon is Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine and Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. Charon also inaugurated and teaches in the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and is co-author of the Perkins Prize winning Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine with Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colón, Danielle Spencer, and Maura Spiegel. Charon was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen is Professor of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. Zetterberg-Nielsen has published widely in both Danish and English and has made his mark in numerous sub-fields of narrative theory, including unnatural narratology, rhetorical narratology, and fictionality studies. Zetterberg-Nielsen’s most recent works in English are the co-edited collections Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited and Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality: A Rhetorical Approach to Storytelling in Contemporary Western Culture (forthcoming). Zetterberg-Nielsen is currently working on several projects, including a study of the interrelations between fictionality and sexuality.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Susan Lanser discuss Sayed Kashua’s 2005 short story, “Herzl Disappears at Midnight.” Susan Lanser is Professor Emerita in three departments at Brandeis University: English; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Comparative Literature. Lanser has done groundbreaking and influential work in multiple fields: narrative theory and the novel (with particular interest in women writers), 18th century European studies, and gender and sexuality studies. In narrative theory, Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol launched what is now one of the most important post-classical approaches to feminist narratology. Lanser’s influential books include The Narrative Act, Fictions of Authority, and The Sexuality of History, and she co-edited with Robyn Warhol Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Lanser is currently working on several projects, including one on narratives of Jerusalem (in collaboration with Shlomith Rimmon Kenan, Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University in Israel).

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Erin James discuss the opening chapter of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, “A Fable for Tomorrow.” Erin James is a Professor of English at the University of Idaho and is the current Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. James has done important and influential work in econarratology, especially on narratives about the climate crisis. Her 2015 book, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, won the Narrative Society’s Perkins Prize for best book in narrative studies. Her 2022 book, Narrative in the Anthropocene, asks what narrative can teach us about the current geological epoch, which is marked by the effects of human activity on the planet, and what that epoch can teach us about narrative.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Yoon Sun Lee discuss the opening narrative from The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. Yoon Sun Lee is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature and Chair of the English Department at Wellesley College. Lee is also the first Vice President of the International Society for Study of Narrative. Lee has offered important research contributions to multiple fields, including British Romanticism, Asian-American Literature, Theory of the Novel, and Narrative Theory. Lee is the author of three books: Nationalism and Irony, Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life, and Natural Laws of Plot: Objectivity in the Novel.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Paul Dawson discuss the proliferation of the term “narrative” in public discourse. Paul Dawson is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Dawson currently serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. A poet as well as a narrative theorist, Dawson is the author of several books, including Creative Writing in the New Humanities, Imagining Winter, The Return of Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-first Century Fiction, and the recently released The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel. In 2024, his new book of poetry will appear. In addition, Dawson has co-edited with Maria Mäkelä The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory, which just came out last year.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Marco Caracciolo discuss Charles Yu’s 2020 short story, “Systems,” which was commissioned by the New York Times for the collection, The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic. Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, and he currently serves as the second Vice President at the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Caracciolo is the author of numerous books, including The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach, Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters, A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with Russell Hurlburt), With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen), and Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Amy Shuman and Mary Hufford discuss an oral narrative Hufford collected at the Headwaters of Southern West Virginia’s Big Coal River Valley. Mary Hufford is Associate Director of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network. After twenty years as a folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, she was on the graduate faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where she directed the Center for Folklore and Ethnography. She has been a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and the Ohio State University and an Adjunct Professor at Goucher College. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author or editor of dozens of articles, monographs, and books, including: “Waging Democracy in the Kingdom of Coal: OVEC and the Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice in Central Appalachia,” Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage, Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, and The Grand Generation: Memory, Mastery, Legacy.