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The Project Narrative podcast is built on the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, a way in which we both seek to understand the world and to change it. The podcast features scholars of narrative in conversation about short narratives that engage in that work of knowing and intervening. In each episode, a scholar reads a narrative aloud and then discusses it with the host of the podcast, Jim Phelan, the director of Project Narrative. The conversations range across a wide array of topics: the guest’s reasons for selecting it; the sources of its appeal, including the pleasures it offers and the challenges it presents; the claims it makes about understanding some part of the world and about doing something as a result.
51 Episodes
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In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes discuss excerpts from her memoir in verse, Ordinary Hazards, published in 2019. Ordinary Hazards has been banned, and this episode will touch on that aspect of Grimes’s experience with the book but initially will focus on the book itself, the story Grimes tells, and how she tells it. Born and raised in New York City, Grimes began composing verse at the age of six and has been writing ever since. Grimes’s output is impressive for both its quantity and its quality, but among her notable titles are Bronx Masquerade, Jazmin’s Notebook, Talkin’ About Bessie, Dark Sons, The Road to Paris, Words with Wings, and the New York Times bestseller Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. Among Grimes’s many notable honors are the Coretta Scott King Award, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award for her “substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children,” the ALAN Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Adolescent Literature, and the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award. Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes connected through Ashley Hope Pérez, who knows Grimes through the Unite to Read project, a three-year initiative at the Ohio State University funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. “The Unite to Read project seeks to combat book bans, engage the public in defending and reading banned books, and unite diverse stakeholders in amplifying access to literature and ideas.”
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Rhona Trauvitch discuss “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu, first published in the August 2012 issue of the online journal Lightspeed, and then included in Liu’s 2016 collection entitled The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor at Florida International University, specializes in cross-disciplinary analogical reasoning, particularly at the intersection of literature and STEM. Trauvitch directs Florida International University’s Science and Fiction Lab, whose mission is to build bridges between research and teaching in STEM fields and in the humanities. Her work in the lab has been supported by Humanities Initiatives Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most recently by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Trauvitch’s own research and teaching have been devoted to exploring how fictionality can be used to enhance non-scientists’ comprehension of science, including especially difficult to comprehend concepts in science. Trauvitch is the author of a forthcoming book, Fi-Sci: Avatars of Science and Fiction, which demonstrates her model in action. Trauvitch has also co-edited a forthcoming special issue of Style on the interrelations of fiction and science.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jan Alber discuss “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler, first published in The New Yorker in 1995, and then included in Robert Olen Butler’s 1997 volume entitled Tabloid Dreams: A Collection. Jan Alber is a Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Culture at the University of Giessen in Germany. Alber has done pioneering work in the study of unnatural narratives and unnatural narratology, with his 2016 book, Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama, a major contribution to that subfield of narrative studies. Alber has also done important work on empirical approaches to narrative, on postmodern and post-postmodern narrative, on narrative ethics, on the relations of narrative theoretical approaches to each other, and on many other subjects. A past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, Alber has shown himself to be an excellent collaborator and interlocutor with other scholars, both in his published work and in his interactions at conferences. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alber worked with Jessica Jumpertz and Deborah de Muijnck to organize over Zoom a series of lectures about narrative and the pandemic. Alber, Jumpertz, and de Muijnck then co-edited the essays in a volume called Pandemic Storytelling, which appeared earlier this year.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Catherine Belling discuss “Laundry” by Susan Onthank Mates, originally published in Mates’s 1994 collection, The Good Doctor. Catherine Belling is Associate Professor of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Belling teaches in the MA program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. She directs the medical students, medical humanities seminars, and teaches in the four-year Clinical Ethics Curriculum and Bioethics Graduate Scholars Program. Belling is a two time winner of prizes from the Society for Literature Science and the Arts. Her 2010 essay in Narrative, “Narrating Oncogenesis,” won the Schachterle Prize for Best Essay by an Untenured Scholar, and her 2012 book, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria, won the 2013 Kendrick Book Prize. Belling served as editor-in-chief of Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018. Her current book project has the working title, Morbid and Disturbing: Medicine and Horror and Horror in Medicine.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Marta Figlerowicz discuss the first chapter of D.O. Fagunwa’s novel, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, “The Author Meets Akara-Ogun.” The novel was originally published in Yoruba in 1938, and it was translated by Wole Soyinka in 1982. Marta Figlerowicz is the Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. Figlerowicz’s scholarly interests include 20th and 21st century American, Brazilian, British French, Polish, and West African literature, as well as the novel, new media, translation studies and narrative theory. Figlerowicz has recently become co-editor of the journal Narrative, along with the guest on the July 2025 podcast episode, Kent Puckett. Figlerowicz’s books include Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character, Spaces of Feeling: Affects and Awareness in Modernist Literature, and a translation of the work of Polish critical theorist Maria Janion, entitled The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader. Figlerowicz is currently working on a project entitled, It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Trans-Cultural Knowledge. In 2024, Figlerowicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work on that project.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Gary Weissman discuss Shalom Auslander’s short story, “Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown,” originally included in the 2005 collection Beware of God. Gary Weissman is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the School of Communication Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Weissman also is an Affiliate Faculty member in the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Judaic Studies. He is the author of Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, and The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature. Weissman has also written many essays on how the Holocaust has been represented in literature, scholarship, photography, and film, and in addition to being a scholar and teacher of graphic and animated narratives, Weissman is himself a skillful cartoonist.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Kent Puckett discuss the 1817 edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Kent Puckett is Professor and Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. Puckett’s areas of expertise include narrative theory, the novel, critical theory, film, and 19th century British literature and culture. Puckett’s books include Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel and Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction, which won the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative for the best book published in 2016. Puckett is also the author of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945, and The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems. Jim Phelan has also now passed the editorial torch for the journal, Narrative, to Kent Puckett and Marta Figlerowicz.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Kelly Marsh discuss Caryl Phillips’s short piece of life writing, “Growing Pains: A Life in 10 Chapters,” first published in The Guardian in August, 2005. Kelly Marsh is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, and her areas of expertise include narrative theory and global fiction in English since 1950. Marsh is the author of The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy, and of essays on Roddy Doyle, Helen Fielding, Marina Carr, Mary McCarthy, and others. Marsh is also an award-winning teacher and a storied member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, where she has recently been elected as Second Vice President of the Society.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Stefan Iversen discuss a story generated by artificial intelligence; more specifically, the story comes from the system operated by OpenAI, in response to the prompt: “please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. Iversen directs the PhD program in Art, Literature, and Cultural Studies. Iversen’s many areas of expertise include narrative and narrative theory, rhetoric, Danish literature, and digital media. Iversen has done important and influential work in unnatural narratology, rhetorical approach to fictionality, and rhetoric in the public sphere. His recent books include Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media, co-authored with Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Carsten Stage. Publications also include the co-edited collection, Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited, and the forthcoming book in the Ohio State series on the theory and interpretation of narrative, Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric: Experimental Fictionality on Digital Platforms.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Daniel Punday discuss Charles Yu’s 2020 short story, “Problems of Self-Study,” which you can access here to read along with the podcast. Daniel Punday is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where he specializes in contemporary American literature, digital media, and literary theory, especially narrative theory. Punday’s books include Narrative after Deconstruction, Five Strands of Fictionality, Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology, Writing at the Limit. The Novel in the New Media Ecology, Computing as Writing, Playing at Narratology, and most recently, Infrastructure in Video Games. Punday has also been a major contributor to the International Society for the Study of Narrative: he served as president; he organized two annual conferences himself, one with his colleague at Mississippi State, Kelly Marsh; Punday also served for several years together with Lindsay Holmgren as a liaison between the society and its other conference organizers.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and David Richter discuss Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Theft,” originally published in 1929 and republished in 1935. David Richter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College of the City University of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center. Richter is an expert on The Bible, on 18th century British literature and culture, and on narrative and critical theory. His single authored books are Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel, and Reading the Eighteenth Century Novel. Richter’s edited books include Falling into Theory, The Critical Tradition, and Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Richter has also written essays on biblical narrative, detective fiction, irony, film, and many other subjects.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Robert Caserio discuss Elizabeth Bowen’s 1945 short story, “I Hear You Say So.” Robert Caserio is Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Studies, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Caserio has multiple areas of expertise, but perhaps most relevant for this episode of the podcast are his deep knowledge of twentieth century literature and of narrative theory. His 1999 book, The Novel in England, 1900–1950: History and Theory, was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative, given annually for the best book in narrative studies. More recently, Caserio has published The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900-1950, and he has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel and co-edited The Cambridge History of the English Novel.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Eyal Segal discuss Sholem Aleichem’s short story, “Baranovich Station.” Eyal Segal is an independent scholar based in Tel Aviv. He has published articles on narrative closure, beginnings and endings, temporal experimentation in narrative, narration in the modernist novel, the poetics of Kafka, and on the Tel Aviv School of Poetics and Semiotics. These essays have appeared in a range of journals and other outlets, including Poetics Today, the journal Narrative, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Amy Elias discuss Lemony Snicket’s 2004 short story, “The Lump of Coal.” Amy Elias teaches and writes at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she holds the title of UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English. Elias is also the director of UT’s Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts. Elias’s areas of expertise include narrative theory, contemporary literature and culture studies, and humanities advocacy, as well as the arts of the present. Elias founded the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, or ASAP. Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, which won the Perkins Prize in 2002. Elias has also edited or co-edited several books, including Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin; The Planetary Turn: Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century; and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Aaron Oforlea discuss James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” published in Baldwin’s 1965 short story collection of the same title. Aaron Oforlea is an Associate Professor of English at Washington State University and is an alumnus of the Ohio State University. Oforlea has cultivated significant expertise in the domains of African American literature, folklore, and rhetoric, as well as in narrative theory, medical humanities, film studies, and masculinity studies. In 2017, Oforlea published James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity, which was honored in 2018 with the College Language Association’s Award for Creative Scholarship. In addition, Oforlea has contributed scholarly articles in the fields of folklore, rhetoric, and literature.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Suzanne Keen discuss John Cheever’s 1960 short story, “The Death of Justina.” Suzanne Keen is a Professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Keen wrote the book on narrative empathy, Empathy in the Novel, which came out in 2007 and opened up a rich and wide ranging debate about the affective dimensions of reading fiction and their consequences for the lives of readers when they’re not reading. Keen’s most recent contribution to that critical conversation is Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader. Keen has written several other books, including Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination, and the widely adopted textbook, Narrative Form. In addition to her work on the novel and narrative theory, Keen has published a volume of poetry, Milk Glass Mermaid, and individual poems in numerous literary magazines.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Christopher González discuss Junot Díaz’s 2024 flash fiction, “The Books of Losing You.” Christopher González is a graduate of The Ohio State University. He is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University, and González has also just begun a term as the Chair of his department. His areas of expertise include 20th century American literature, Latinx literary and cultural production, multiethnic literatures of the United States, film, comics, and narrative theory. González is the author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books including Reading Junot Díaz; the International Latino Book Award-winning Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film & TV, co-authored with Frederick Aldama; the Perkins Prize Honorable Mention Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature; and his 2024 memoir, Big Scary Brown Guy.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Dorothee Birke discuss Ali Smith’s short story, “Text for the Day,” from her 1995 collection, Free Love and Other Stories. Dorothee Birke is professor for Anglophone Literatures at the University of Innsbruck, and her many areas of expertise include the history of the novel, reading and book culture, memory studies, and narrative theory. Birke is the author of two books, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel and Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity, and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels. Among Birke’s numerous articles, she has won the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s annual prize for best essay in the journal for an article co-authored with Birte Christ, Ellen McCracken and Paul Benzon for Narrative, “Paratexts and Digital Narrative.” Birke is currently the second vice president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Brian McAllister discuss Juliana Spahr’s 2005 poem, “Gentle Now Don’t Add to Heartache.” Brian McAllister is Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. McAllister’s areas of expertise include modern and contemporary literature, poetry studies, environmental literature, econarratology, and rhetorical narratology. Among other topics, McAllister has published essays on Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Edwin Morgan. He served as the guest editor of the 2014 special issue of Narrative on narrative and poetry. McAllister also has an essay forthcoming in the October 2024 issue of Narrative: “Landscape Rhetoricity: Narrative, Ecology, and Topographic Form.”
In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Daphna Edrinast-Vulcan discuss Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story, “The Fly.” Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. Her main areas of scholarly interest are modernism and the modernist novel, Joseph Conrad, Mikhail Bakhtin, philosophy and literature, ethnography and literature, historiography and fiction, and literature and psychoanalysis. Erdinast-Vulcan is the author of many influential publications, including Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: Writing, Culture, and Subjectivity, and Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject.
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really enjoyed the episode, but to me the ethics of the murder plot take deeply away from the formal playfulness of the narrative. the circuity of it feels deeply troubling