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James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where he is also Director of Medical Humanities and Director of Project Narrative. Phelan teaches and writes about narrative theory, the medical humanities, the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present, and nonfiction narrative. He has devoted his research to thinking through what it means to conceive of narrative as rhetoric, or, in the words of his default rhetorical definition, as "somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened." He has authored or co-authored over ten books—including Worlds from Words (1981), Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell About It (2005), Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 (2013), and Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017)—as well many essays exploring narrative structure, voice, and fictionality. He edited the journal Narrative from 1992 through 2025 and continues to co-edit the Ohio State University Press book series The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. His honors include OSU’s Distinguished Scholar Award and Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award; membership in the Norwegian Çï¿ûÊÓƵ of Science and Letters; an honorary degree from Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.