Chrōnos, Tempus, Time:
Temporality in Philosophy, Literature, & the Arts
May 15-16, 2026
"Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates."
~Sartre, Nausea
The Philosophy & Literature Workshop at Stanford and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins welcome submissions for the 7th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference to be held in person on May 15-16th, 2026 at Stanford University. This year’s conference topic, “Chrōnos, Tempus, Time: Temporality in Philosophy, Literature & the Arts” brings together doctoral students and scholars that work at the intersection of philosophy, literature, the arts, and media studies.
Description
Philosophy and Literature both take temporality as a subject of perennial interest. Philosophy has long concerned itself with the nature and metaphysics of time, its phenomenology, and the consequences of our apparent finitude. Literature has done much of the same, while more substantially incorporating temporality into its formal characteristics, e.g. in general narrative form, in manipulations of linearity, temporal perspective -shifting, &c. Furthermore, artforms such as music and cinema are acutely related to and defined by time-boundedness, and are generally temporal forms of representation. This conference seeks to explore temporality and its myriad relations to central concepts or motifs in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
Some possible avenues of investigation include:
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Nature and the phenomenology of time
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Human finitude and the meaning of life
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Time in philosophers like Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, &c.
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Time and poetry
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Music and cinema as temporal forms of representation
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Flashbacks, nostalgia, memory, foreshadowing, recurrence, alienation
Proposal Submission
All submissions must be sent via email in a single Word document entitled "Last Name Stanford-JHU" to philandlitgradconference@gmail.com no later than January 19th, 2026, and include the following items: (1) an abstract (300 words max), (2) a short bio, (3) your full name, email address, and affiliation. Please use "Philosophy and Literature Conference Stanford-JHU" in the subject line.
Keynote Speakers
R. Lanier Anderson
Stanford University
Maya Kronfeld
Duke University
Joshua Landy (workshop)
Stanford University
Program
FRIDAY, May 15 | Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall (map)
8:30-9:30am Breakfast
9:30am Opening Remarks
10:00-11:30am Panel: Kant, Time, Interpretation and Taste
Chair: Grant Ray (Stanford University)
Subin Nam (University of Michigan), "The Temporal Synthesis of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Taste"
Emily Shein (University of Chicago), "'Abyss of Reason': Kant on Analogy, Symbolic Identification, and
Human Finitude"
11:30am-1:00pm Panel: Finitude and Religion
Chair: Tomer Cherki (Johns Hopkins University)
Alicia Badea (University of Chicago), "Finitude as Condition: Renunciation and the Restoration of Meaning in Rilke and Kierkegaard"
Paige Anna Busse (Johns Hopkins University), "Temporality of the Flesh: John Donne and the Poetics of Finitude"
Utsav Gupta (Stanford University), "Scattered in Times, Gathered in One: The Reformation of Perception in Augustine's Confessions"
1:00-2:30pm Lunch
2:30-4:00pm Panel: Formal Temporal Elements in Literature
Chair: Ellie Wong (Johns Hopkins University)
Henry Barlow (Oxford University), "On the Time of Teaching in Ulysses"
Rocío Gómez-Ruiz (Oxford University), "Reading in Time: The Temporal Experience of the Victorian Serial"
4:00-4:30pm Coffee Break
4:30-6:00pm Keynote Lecture
Prof. Maya Kronfeld (Literature, Duke University), "Time Signatures"
7:00pm Presenters' Dinner at Terun Pizza (map)
SATURDAY, MAY 16 | Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall (map)
9:00-10:00am Breakfast
10:00am-11:30am Panel: Ethics, Agency, Change
Chair: Konstantinos Konstantinou (Stanford University)
Lukas Joosten (Oxford University), "Navigating from the Mast: Binding, Autonomy, and Irrevocable Consent"
Carl Sohmer (University of California, Irvine), "The Epiphanies of Achilles and Epiphanic Moral Theory"
Rose Gotlieb (University of Chicago), "Ethical Universals and Historical Change in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End"
12:00pm-1:30pm Panel: Life in Retrospect
Chair: Korinne Hensley (Stanford University)
Jeremy Garbe (Independent), "'Since Time Was, I Am, For Ever': Temporality and the Scope of Human Freedom in Beauvoir's Philosophy and Literature"
Abhiraj Singh (University of Chicago), "The Fundamental Incompleteness of Our Lives: Understanding Human Finitude in Lucretius through Rushdie's Oklahoma"
Nikolas Land (University of Chicago), "Heidegger and Proust on Recollection and the World"
1:30-3:00pm Lunch
3:00-4:30pm Workshop
Prof. Joshua Landy (Comparative Literature, Stanford University), "The Shape of Your Life"
4:30-5:00pm Coffee Break
5:00-6:30pm Keynote Lecture
Prof. R. Lanier Anderson (Philosophy, Stanford University)
6:30-7:00pm Closing Remarks
7:00pm Reception