James Geary is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at the VII Foundation, Bennington College, Boston University, Brandeis University, the Faber Academy, Tufts University, and the Harvard Extension School, and he has been an Ida Beam Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.
Geary is the author of the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, the second edition of which is published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also 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, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses.
Geary's articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Prospect, The Irish Times, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Geary has given talks and conducted writing workshops at, among other venues, TED, Live from the New York Public Library, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Hay-on-Wye Festival, the Charleston Literary Festival, the Genoa Science Festival, the Chautauqua Institution and the Seoul Digital Forum.