Scholarship and Biography
James Geary is a lecturer in journalism at Brandeis University, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a lecturer in the English and Journalism departments at Boston University. From 2013 to 2023, he was the deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and editor of Nieman Reports. He is the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine. He is the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, the New YorkTimes bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses.