Storytelling, broadly defined, represents an effort to understand the world. It is, as Peter Brooks has written, “one of the principal ways we organize our experience.” If story, as many scholars have argued, is little more than a sequence of events, storytelling is the process by which we give shape to those events, emphasizing what is most important and essential. While storytelling finds a natural home in the humanities, where the study of literature, history, language, and culture, leads us to good stories told well, it is equally important throughout and beyond the university.
For the 2025 BYU Humanities Center annual symposium, we seek papers and presentations that explore how storytelling impacts our understanding of virtually every discipline. More importantly, we welcome contributions that show how storytelling serves as a bridge between disciplines. How, for example, does storytelling create dialogue between the humanities and the sciences? How does it shape a wide range of pedagogies? How has it evolved in the face of advancing technologies? How does it refine our understanding of both written and oral traditions? How might storytelling make us better citizens? How might it change and improve the way we think?