Conference Date and Venue:
Wednesday April 11 (10am-6pm) and Thursday April 12 (9.15am-4.30pm), 2018
Will Eisner Seminar Room, Sullivant Hall, North Entrance
1813 N. High Street, Columbus
See schedule page for more details
Innumerable images could be associated with “time”
Conference Description
Time and temporal phenomena are crucial to many disciplines and within cultures around the globe, past and present. Yet what people mean by “time” varies, and the words available in different languages, whether disciplinary or vernacular, often fall short of describing the ephemerality of temporal experience. To quote St. Augustine, “it is no simple matter even to understand what [time] is, let alone find words to explain it” (Confessions XI.15). Metaphors of Time: An Interdisciplinary Conversation across the Arts, Humanities and Sciences will critically and creatively investigate, expand, and reinvent paradigms used to explain time and temporality. Our conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers, and practitioners from the social and natural sciences, engineering, medicine, visual and performative arts, and across the humanities. Each participant will choose a single, accessible metaphor for time used in their discipline or area of study to share with the group, as a way to probe diverse understandings of time from different realms of human experience and scientific inquiry. This conference will provide the central fulcrum for a multi-layered set of projects: undergraduate courses, an edited book, and a partnership with Fordham University that “envisions” the variety of images and metaphors that are used to express or understand time and temporality. The goal of this conference is to foster new pathways for thinking about time that can lead to creative solutions in engineering, science, arts, and humanities and especially between them.