Jonathan Gottschall


Jonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar specializing in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, where he is a distinguished fellow in the English department. He is the author or editor of seven books.

Education

He completed graduate work in English at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he worked under David Sloan Wilson.

Recognition

Gottschall was profiled by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work was featured in an article in Science describing literature and evolution.

Selected works

His work The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer describes the Homeric epic poems Iliad and Odyssey in terms of evolutionary psychology, with the central violent conflicts in these works driven by the lack of young women to marry and the resulting evolutionary legacy, as opposed to the violent conflicts being driven by honor or wealth.
Literature, Science and a New Humanities advocates that the humanities, and literary studies in particular, need to avail themselves of quantitative and objective methods of inquiry as well as the traditional qualitative and subjective, if they are to produce cumulative, progressive knowledge, and provides a number of case studies that apply quantitative methods to fairy and folk tale around the world to answer questions about human universals and differences.
Gottschall's book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, is about the evolutionary mystery of storytelling—about the way we shape stories, and stories shape us. A review by The Virginian-Pilot said "Gottschall assesses and accounts for that powerful narrative attraction in a compelling chronicle of his own...and it is a certifiable knee-slap, three-pipe, blue-moon ripsnorter. The Storytelling Animal was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
In his latest book, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, Gottschall describes the three years he spent at a Mixed Martial Arts gym trying to learn how to fight. He uses this experience as a way to explore the evolutionary psychology of violence, masculinity, and sports.

List of works