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. 

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Some possible avenues of investigation include: 

• Nature and the phenomenology of time

• Human finitude and the meaning of life

• Time in philosophers like Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, &c. 

• Time and poetry

• Music and cinema as temporal forms of representation

• 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.