Jonathan Gottschall

Jonathan Gottschall teaches in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College, is the the author or editor of six books, and is one of the leading figures in a new effort to bridge the humanities-sciences divide. While his PhD is in English, his main dissertation advisor was the prominent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, and he splits his publishing between psychology and literary journals. His work has been featured in major international magazines and newspapers, such as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, Scientific American Mind, New Scientist, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. It has also been the subject of reviews and reporting in journals like Nature and Science. His latest book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin 2012) is about the mysteries of storytelling -- about how people shape stories, and how they shape us.