James L. Flanagan was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the fields of acoustics, speech, and audio processing.

His work laid the foundation for modern voice recognition and telephone technologies. He made pioneering contributions to digital signal processing, including speech coding, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

Flanagan was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1996 for his numerous contributions to the science of acoustics and signal processing.

In 1992, he was elected as founding member of the European Academy of Engineering.

And he acted as president of the European Academy of Engineering in 1994.