91²Ö¿â

Conference Programs

The list below shows previous Philosophy Graduate Student Conference programs.

 Graduate Student Conference Programs

2026 Conference Program

Lanei Rodemeyer

Lanei Rodemeyer 

 

33rd Annual 91²Ö¿â Philosophy Graduate Student Conference In Remembrance of May 4th

 

Saturday, March 28th, 2026

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Lanei Rodemeyer 

Associate Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University

 
Prof. Matthew Coate, Program Coordinator
Logistics (directions, accommodations, etc.)
All paper sessions will be held in , Room 306AB

 


 Opening RemarksDeirdre (Dee) Warren, Ph.D.
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
10:15 â€“ 10:25 

 


 Session I.A  
 

Justin Correa, University of Western Ontario

"Aristotle’s Second Condition for Particular Injustice"

Moderator: Austin Melton

10:25 – 11:10

 


 Session I.B  
 

Changshuo SunUniversity of Miami

"Metaphysical Indeterminacy from Social Construction"

Moderator: Isaac Bradley

11:20 – 12:05

 


 Session I.C 
 

Carson (Hye) Kelly, George Washington University

"The 'Duty of Assistance' and 'Structural Injustice:' U.S. Military Intervention in the Development of South Korea"

Moderator: Cassidy Russell

12:15 -1:00 

 


 

 Lunch

1:00 –2:00 

 


 Session II.A 
 

Jack Swick, University of New Mexico

 "Speciesism as AvidyÄ"

Moderator: Joan Stickney

2:10 – 2:55 

 


 Session II.B 
 

Colt Hutchinson, Duquesne University

"Touch and the Limits of Immediacy in Husserl and Derrida"

Moderator: Zoey Johnson

3:05 – 3:50
 Keynote Address 
 
Dr. Lanei Rodemeyer, Duquesne University

Keynote Address: "Applications of Phenomenology: An Inquiry into the Structures of Racism and Anti-racism"

Moderator: Prof. Matthew Coate

4:00 – 5:15 
 Closing Remarks

5:20 –5:25 

 

May 4th Memorial Visit

Guide: Prof. Frank Ryan

5:30 –6:00 

Logistics

For directions, please visit the 91²Ö¿â website.

Free parking is available for conference participants in the Student Center visitor lot (free on weekends). View a map .  Details, scroll down to "Kent Student Center Visitors"

If you have questions please contact: philconf@kent.edu

2025 Conference Program

Graham Priest 

32nd Annual 91²Ö¿â Philosophy Graduate Student Conference In Remembrance of May 4th 

Saturday, March 1st, 2025

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Graham Priest 

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
CUNY Graduate Center

Prof. Matthew Coate, Program Coordinator
Logistics (directions, accommodations, etc.)
All paper sessions will be held in , Room 306AB

 


 Opening Remarks

Introduction: Prof. Michael Byron,        
Professor & Chair of Philosophy

Dean's Welcome Remarks: Mandy Munro-Stasiuk, PhD,   
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

10:15 â€“ 10:25 

 


 Session I.A  
 

Cecilia Saez (she/her), University of Montana

 "The Work That Disappears: Land Art, Désoeuvrement, and the Possibility of Expressing Nature"

Moderator: Tim Patrick

10:25 – 11:10

 


 Session I.B  
 

Matthew-Jack Biley (he/him), University of Montana

"Plato's Ecological Function Argument: Constitutive Virtue for a Modern Environmental Ethics"

Moderator: Anya Galperin (she/her)

11:20 – 12:05

 


 Session I.C 
 

Austin Meek (he/him), Eastern Michigan University

"A Virtue Responsibilist Approach to Epistemological Extremism"

Moderator: Nathan Brant (he/him)

12:15 -1:00 

 


 

 Lunch

1:00 –2:00 

 


 Session II.A 
 

Ethan Shahan (he/him), University of Rochester

"Heidegger's Stoß and the Aesthetic Experience of Late-Modernity"

Moderator: Benjamin Campbell (he/they)

2:10 – 2:55 

 


 Session II.B 
 

Hyeongyun Kim (he/him), The University of Iowa

"Bridging Theories of Social Kinds: From Searle to a Discovery-Invention Continuum"

Moderator: Deirdre Jenkins (she/her)

3:05 – 3:50
 Keynote Address 
 

Dr. Graham Priest, CUNY Graduate Center 

Keynote Address: "Social Atomism"

Moderator: Prof. Matthew Coate (he/him)

4:00 – 5:15 
 Closing Remarks

5:20 –5:25 

 

May 4th Memorial Visit

Guide: Prof. Frank Ryan

5:30 –6:00 

Logistics

For directions, please visit the 91²Ö¿â website.

Free parking is available for conference participants in the Student Center visitor lot (free on weekends). View a map .  Details, scroll down to "Kent Student Center Visitors"

If you have questions please contact: philconf@kent.edu

2024 Conference Program

Anthony Steinbock

Anthony Steinbock 

31st Annual 91²Ö¿â Philosophy Graduate Student Conference In Remembrance of May 4th 

Saturday, March 16th, 2024

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Anthony Steinbock 

Professor of Philosophy
Stony Brook University

Prof. Matthew Coate, Program Coordinator
Logistics (directions, accommodations, etc.)
All paper sessions will be held in , Room 306AB

 


 Opening Remarks

Introduction: Prof. Michael Byron,        
Professor & Chair of Philosophy

Associate Dean's Welcome Remarks: Deirdre M. Warren PhD,   
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

10:00 â€“ 10:10 

 


 Session I.A  
 

Patrick Hall (he/him), Loyola Marymount University

 "Plotinus on Beauty and the Significance of Nature""

Moderator: Nathan Brant (he/him)

10:15 – 11:00

 


 Session I.B  
 

Yusuke Satake, University of Rochester

"A Theoretical Limit of Modal Dispositionalism"

Moderator: Cody Tangemen (he/him)

11:10 – 11:55

 


 Session I.C 
 

Sam Morkal-Williams (he/him), Bowling Green State University

"Fact-Insensitive Principles and the Scope of Fundamental Justice"

Moderator: Karl Palomino Flores (he/him)

12:05 – 12:50 

 


 

 Lunch

1:00 –2:00 

 


 Session II.A 
 

Erik J. Alvarado-Quinteros (he/him), Oklahoma State University

"What Can We See?"

Moderator: Anya Galperin (she/her)

2:10 – 2:55 

 


 Session II.B 
 

Abigail Whalen (she/her), University of Notre Dame

"The Necessary Existence of God on a Modal Realist Account: Two Proposals"

Moderator: Tera Vangelos (she/her)

3:05 – 3:50
 Session II.C 
 

McGwire Hidden (he/him), Western Michigan University

"Phenomenological Absence as the Foundation of Grief"

Moderator: Tianrong Lin (he/him)

 

4:00 – 4:45
 Keynote Address 
 

Dr. Anthony J. Steinbock, Stony Brook University 

Keynote Address: "Exemplarity and the Cognition of Value: Feeling, Meaning, and Value in Phenomenology"

Moderator: Prof. Matthew Coate (he/him)

5:00 – 6:15 
 Closing Remarks

6:20 –6:25 

Logistics

For directions, please visit the 91²Ö¿â website.

Free parking is available for conference participants in the Student Center visitor lot (free on weekends). View a map .  Details, scroll down to "Kent Student Center Visitors"

If you have questions please contact: philconf@kent.edu

2023 Conference Program
  • Vincent Tanzil — Intuition as Evidence
  • J.A. Littler — The Jesus Who Cannot Save
  • William Schumacher — Reasonableness Requires Good Reasoning
  • Marlon Rivas Tinoco — Believing Rationally Given Your Actual Beliefs
  • Najii Wilcox — Refusal and Double Consciousness
  • Colby Clark — What is the Right Unit for the Ecological Resilience Concept?
  • John Nolt — The Long-term Non-anthropocentric Ethics of Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss (Keynote)
2022 Conference Program
  • Yifan Wang — Old Wine in New Bottle? A Marxist Critique of the Trend of Sustainable Brands
  • Steven Winterfeldt — The Content of Perception: Inadequacy and Transcendence
  • Sterling Hall — Haraway at the Crossroads: On Two Types of Materialism in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’
  • Isaac Shur — Should Private Property Rights Have Term Limits?
  • William Burgess Applegate — Making the Implicit Explicit: The Narrative Self in Cavarero's Relating Narratives
  • Jordan Myers — Replacing Retribution with Reactivity: How Restorative Justice Reduces Offender Harm
  • Laura Hengehold — Locating Gendered Affects in the Political Imaginary (Keynote)
2021 Conference Program
  • Katherine Brichacek — A Tale of Two Movements: Hannah Arendt’s Inconsistently Nonideal Political Action in Zionism and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Eric Shoemaker — The Equal Opportunity to be a Legislator: Why Randomly Selecting Legislators is More Democratic than Electing Them
  • Andrew Stewart — The Life and Death of the State of Nature
  • Emmanuel Cuisinier — Challenges and Contentions to Romantic Love in Spinoza’s Ethics
  • Bowen Chan — Fairness, Friendship, and Proportionality
  • Shoshana McClarence — Existentialism and Mysticism: Bridging the Divide Between the Individual and the Interconnectivity
  • Sherri Irvin — Policing, Racialization, and Resistance: An Aesthetic Analysis (Keynote)
2020 Conference Program
  • Grady Stuckman — The Scope of Religious Freedom: Is There Room for Conscientious Objection in Healthcare?
  • Alex K. Sell — Algorithmic Storytelling: the Narrative of Predictive Analytics
  • Ayoob Shahmoradi — Seeing As Seeing-as and Thinking As Thinking-as
  • David Cortright — Memory and Meaning: 91²Ö¿â after 50 Years (Keynote)
  • Dovie Jenkins — Sexism as Epistemic Negligence
  • Clint Hurshman — Longino's Forgotten Virtue: The Epistemic Necessity of Novelty
  • Matthew Turyn — Emotions & Motivations in Tappolet's Perceptual Theory
2019 Conference Program
  • Sofia Paz — A Defense of Hume's Theory of Action
  • David DeMatteo — Practical Identity and Practical Principles: Kant contra Korsgaard
  • Cullin Brown — Toleration and Equality in Public Institutions
  • Troy Seagraves — Reasons and Virtue: an Aristotelian Constructivism
  • Jenny Marsh — Kant on the Justification of Empirical vs. A Priori Concepts
  • Marcia Baron — Reasonableness (Keynote)
  • Julian D. Rios Acuña — Imagining Politics Otherwise: Ontology, Globalization and Absolute Locality in Adriana Cavaero
  • Bailey Szustak — Captain America, Nazi: Why Identity Conditions for Fictional Characters Matter
2018 Conference Program
  • Adam White — Constitutional Revision: Term Accountability
  • James Darcy — Grounding Necessitation and Composition
  • Colin Bodayle — Hegel on Infinite Judgments
  • David Wood — The End of the World as We Know It (Keynote)
  • Min Tang — Poetry, Aesthetic Truths, and Transformative Experience
  • Zach Thanasilangkul — Anarchism in the Wake of Marx: Subjectivity, Self-Activity, and Emancipation
  • Javiera Perez-Gomez — Microaggressions
2017 Conference Program
  • Ross Colebrook — Does it Matter Whether Morality is Objective?
  • Bryan Maddox — Active Interpretation: Arendt’s Hermeneutics of Dissent
  • Michael Gregory — The Ontological Foundations of Holism
  • Rachel McNealis — Hetero-Next-uals: Rupturing Straight Time in Cringeworthy Phases of Sexual Experimentation
  • Walter Reid — Suffering, Self-Knowledge, and the Limits of Pessimism
  • Evan Woods — The Wrongful Inclusion Problem and Jenkins' Analysis of Gender Concepts
  • David Danks — Trust and the Ethics of Autonomous Machines (Keynote)
  • Ryan Felder — Moral Responsibility and Liability of Defensive Harm
  • Camille Charette — Art Before Science: A Deweyan Analysis of Artwork as a Model and Means of Growth
  • Joseph Dunne — Here I Stand: Religious Conscience and Legal Exemptions