Johns Hopkins/Stanford Phil + Lit Graduate Student Conference 2025: Altered Sight, Altered Minds

For the 6th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Student Conference, the Philosophy & Literature Workshop at Stanford and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University brought together doctoral students and scholars who worked at the intersection of philosophy, literature, the arts, and media studies to interrogate theories of consciousness, perception, and what it meant to “see” beyond the visual paradigm of experience.

The 2025 conference invited participants to consider how the representation of atypical conscious experience in literature and the arts—such as mystical visions, dreams, madness, and psychedelia—could shed light on a range of philosophical issues. It asked: How could a work of literature or philosophy teach us to see, and what mode of perception were we referring to when we posed this question?

Keynote Speakers:

• Anthony Aumann (Northern Michigan University) “Art and Experiential Knowledge: The Case of Nightbitch and Motherhood”
• David Yaden (JHU, School of Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) “What are Psychedelic Experiences Like?”

Workshop Leader:

• Arielle Saber (JHU, Italian Studies) “Which Way to Inner Space?” 

Organizers:

• Emilee Brecht (Johns Hopkins University) 
• Alfredo Walls (Johns Hopkins University)

Participants:

• Daeun Kim (Indiana University Bloomington) “Friends, Vision or No Vision: William Blake’s Visionary Heads and Friendship” 
• Jack Rodgers (Harvard University) “Madness and the Mind of Winter: Modern Vatic Poetry in Stevens and Crane” 
• Tanavi Shirish Jagdale (Johns Hopkins University) “Amrutānubhav: Dnyāneshwar’s Altered View of the Non-Dual”
• Emily Shein (University of Chicago) “Kant on Poetic Cognition”
• Adam Katwan (University of Chicago) “Dream, Negation, and Revelation in Philo, Freud, and Benjamin”
• Andrew Fleshman (University of California, Los Angeles) “Who Looks Out From Its Eyes? – Varieties of Consciousness in Peter Watts’ Blindsight”
• Emily Park (University of Virginia) “‘Looking Like’: Perception, Sight, and Simile in Mishima’s Spring Snow”
• Ellie Wong (Stanford University) “Dissolving Margins: Altered Perception and Relational Selfhood in My Brilliant Friend”
• Chelsea Christine Hill (University of Chicago) “The Flying (Wo)man in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things”
• Seungmin Baek (Indiana University Bloomington) “Coleridge’s Double Touch and the Feeling of Existence”
• Michael Henderson (Washington University in St. Louis) “Spaced Out on Utopia: The Politics of Intoxication in Modernist Portrayals of Futurity”
• Matthew Raymond (McGill University) “Tearing Open the Firmament: Chaos, Creation and Altered States in Deleuze and Guattari”
• Andrew Stone (University of Chicago) “Immersion by Restriction in Virtual Reality”
• Jeremy Garbe (Carleton University) “The Flowers of Madness”: Altered Mental States and the Imaginary in Sartre’s Philosophy and Literature”
• Irina Znamirowski (University of Toronto) “Woyzeck’s Stupid Dreams: Consciousness, Qualia, and Editorial Histories in George Büchner’s Woyzeck”
• Kristen De Man (University of Chicago) “Unconcealing the Ordinary: Madness, Sense, and Fantasy in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations”
• Nishan Varatharajan (University of Chicago) “Knowing Left From Right in Plato’s Phaedrus”

The New Politics of Existence

The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute’s Calley Symposium. Co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Thought and Literature, Philosophy, and Modern Languages and Literatures

In 2022, leading voices convened for AGHI’s Calley Symposium to discuss the theme of “The New Politics of Existence,” exploring how existentialist thought from Kierkegaard to Heidegger to de Beauvoir and Sartre emphasizes the precarity and vulnerability of existence, as well as its freedom and responsibility. The Calley Symposium—given today’s world of impending climate catastrophe, misogynist and racist retrenchment, and nationalist resurgence—foregrounded the philosophical inquiry into the nature of human existence which has gained renewed urgency. To examine these pressing issues, scholars from JHU as well as Yale, URI, Purdue, Oberlin College, Barnard, Tufts, and more gathered for two days of provocative talks and discussions.

Existentialist thought from Kierkegaard and Heidegger to de Beauvoir and Sartre emphasizes the precarity and vulnerability of existence as well as its freedom and responsibility. In today’s world of impending climate catastrophe, misogynist and racist retrenchment, and nationalist resurgence, the philosophical inquiry into the nature of human existence has attained renewed urgency.

• Martin Hägglund, Yale
  The Material Conditions of Spiritual Freedom
• James Haile, URI
  All Hail King Kunta: The Death of the Black Subject and the Resurrection of the Black Individual in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
• Yi-Ping Ong, JHU
  Kierkegaard and Heidegger on the Concept of the Public
• William McBride, Purdue
  Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022
• Sonia Kruks, Oberlin College & Conservatory
  Thinking about old age with Simone de Beauvoir
• Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, JHU
  The Ecologies of Existentialism
• William Egginton, JHU
  Made to Measure: Existentialism and the Anthropic Principle
• Taylor Carman, Barnard College Columbia University
  Is Existence Intelligible?
• Nancy Bauer, Tufts
  The Existence of Women