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.
The 2025 BYU Humanities Center annual symposium focused on the theme of storytelling and its influence across disciplines. The event highlighted how storytelling not only shapes our understanding within individual fields but also serves as a bridge between them. The symposium featured presentations that examined the role of narrative in fostering dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, influencing diverse pedagogical approaches, and evolving alongside technological advancements. Participants explored how storytelling refines our engagement with both written and oral traditions, contributes to civic understanding, and enhances the ways we think and communicate across academic and public spheres.
Plenary Speakers
“Finding Natural Form in Narrative”
Jane Alison is the author of five novels, most recently, Villa E, about the collision of architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier (Norton/Liveright), along with The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and Nine Island. She has published a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, about growing up in a family in which parents traded partners (Houghton); Change Me, translations of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation (Oxford); and a book on the craft and theory of writing, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult). She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and divides her time between Charlottesville and Campeche, with her partner, architect Edward Tuck.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Dr. Eagleman’s areas of research include sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia; he also studies the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system, and in that capacity he directs the Center for Science and Law. Eagleman is the author of many books, including Livewired, The Runaway Species, The Brain, Incognito, and Wednesday is Indigo Blue. He is also the author of a widely adopted textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Brain and Behavior, as well as a bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 32 languages, turned into two operas, and named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble. Dr. Eagleman writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, Economist, Time, Discover, Slate, Wired, and New Scientist, and appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature. He has been a TED speaker, a guest on the Colbert Report, and profiled in the New Yorker magazine. He has spun several neurotech companies out of his lab. He runs the top ranking science podcast Inner Cosmos and is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series.