Project Narrative

The Ohio State University
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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.

  1. 15 HR AGO

    Episode 51: Jim Phelan & Nikki Grimes — excerpts from Nikki Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards

    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.”

    54 min

  2. 19/12/2025

    Episode 50: Jim Phelan & Rhona Trauvitch — Ken Liu’s “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”

    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.

    47 min

  3. 26/11/2025

    Episode 49: Jim Phelan & Jan Alber — Robert Olen Butler’s “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”

    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.

    49 min

  4. 12/11/2025

    Episode 48: Jim Phelan & Catherine Belling — Susan Onthank Mates’s “Laundry”

    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.

    52 min

  5. 06/10/2025

    Episode 47: Jim Phelan & Marta Figlerowicz — Chapter 1 of D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, “The Author Meets Akara-Ogun”

    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.

    46 min

  6. 03/09/2025

    Episode 46: Jim Phelan & Gary Weissman — Shalom Auslander’s “Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown”

    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.

    53 min

  7. 27/07/2025

    Episode 45: Jim Phelan & Kent Puckett — Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

    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.

    1h 10m

  8. 02/07/2025

    Episode 44: Jim Phelan & Kelly Marsh — Caryl Phillips’s “Growing Pains”

    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.

    47 min
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About

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.

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