Originally broadcast at 10:30 a.m. ET Monday August 16, 2021.

Angus Fletcher is an award-winning teacher, bestselling author, and one of the world’s foremost scholars on the neuroscience of storytelling. He is currently Professor of Story Science at Ohio State University’s Project Narrative, the globe’s top academic think-tank for the study of stories. A professor of both English and Film Studies at OSU, with a background in neuroscience, Fletcher opens the Chautauqua Lecture Series week on “The Human Brain” with a discussion of the brain and literature acting together to the benefit of our understanding of the world.

Fletcher, who has previously taught at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Yale University, is the author of three books. His most recent is Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, has been formally endorsed by some of the world’s most respected psychologists, neuroscientists, doctors and literary scholars. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Additionally, Fletcher is a Black List and Nicholl award-winning screenwriter.

Fletcher has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, and received his Ph.D. from Yale University.

This program is made possible by the G. Thomas and Kathleen Harrick Lectureship Endowment and the Richard Newman Campen "Chautauqua Impressions" Fund.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.