Grasping KAIROS

Kristine is Assistant Professor of English Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to joining the UvA faculty in 2012, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an Instructor at the University of St. Andrews. She received her Ph.D. (2010) and M.Litt (2006) from St Andrews. In 2013, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press published her scholarly edition Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century: Five Plays.  She has also published book chapters on nostalgia and translation and adaptation, and is a contributor to the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. 

Her current work on kairos/occasio is driven by an interest in the relationshop between time and emotion in early modern drama. At the moment, Kristine is working on how momentary time tempers “excessive” emotion on stage for a paper provisionally titled, “Refusing Melancholy: Occasio as Mediator of Emotion on the Early Modern Stage”.

Network Director

Sarah is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. She has also lectured at University College Dublin, University of Roehampton, Central School of Speech and Drama, and Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently working on her first book, Time and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. This book examines time, and more specifically delay, as a marker of gender on the early modern stage.

Sarah’s interest in kairos began with her study of temporality in Jacobean revenge tragedy, and she is particularly interested in the gendering of Occasio in early modern drama and culture.

Network Director

Joanne is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex. She published her article on kairos in Renaissance political theory in Renaissance Quarterly in 2014. Her book on the thought of Thomas More was published with Polity in 2016. 

Joanne is finalizing her PhD (completed 2013) on early modern counsel for publication with Cambridge University Press; the book will have a substantial consideration of counsel. She hopes to complete a major research project into the Renaissance theory of kairos in the coming years.

Network Director

Marina lectures in English Literature at University College Dublin. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern literary and iconographic representations of Fortune and Opportunity, with a particular focus on drama and poetry. Her PhD thesis (National University of Ireland, Galway) explores the shifting representations and functions of Fortune in different versions of the Troilus and Cressida story, focusing on Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. She has recently convened a module on representations of Time and Fortune on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage for the MA in Renaissance Literature and Culture (UCD/QUB).

Marina is currently working on the iconography of the Fortuna-Occasio topos in early printed texts and incunabula.

Carol is a post-doctoral research associate on the Leverhulme-funded Anachronism and Antiquity project at the Faculty of Classics, Oxford, and a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at St Hugh's College. She previously held teaching positions at St Hugh's College and the University of Warwick. She holds undergraduate degrees from the London School of Economics (in Government) and University of Cambridge (in Classics), followed by MPhil and PhD in Classics, also at Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on the discourse of kingship in ancient Greek political thought, and examined positive accounts of kings as founders, unifiers and the source of virtue in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greek texts by authors including Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates and Xenophon. Carol has published several articles and chapters on fourth-century BCE Greek political thought, and is currently writing a monograph on the temporality of Platonic dialogue

Carol’s interest in the kairos centres on its development and use as a concept by Greek political theorists, in whose works awareness of the kairos marks skilled leaders and politicians and effective rule. This theme contributes to a broader project on the contribution of rulers to political communities in the Greek and Hellenistic worlds.

Barbara Baert is Professor of Art History at KU Leuven. Her research is situated in the field of Iconology, Art Theory & Analysis, and Medieval Art. Baert published several books and articles in a variety of scientific A1/ISI/peer review journals, with emphasis on the role of the sensorium in the arts, on visual culture, and on the past, presence and future of visual anthropology. In 2016, Barbara Baert was awarded with the prestigious Francqui Prize, which counts as the highest scientific distinction in Belgium, for her outstanding interdisciplinary achievements in the Bildwissenschaften in particular and for her international impact on the Human Sciences in general.

Since 2018, she supervises, in collaboration with Han Lamers (University of Oslo/KU Leuven), a research project entitled “Kairós, or the Right Moment: Nachleben and Iconology” funded by KU Leuven (2018–22). She also published a book and several articles on kairós: Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium: Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics, (Studies in Iconology, 5), Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2016; “Kairos: Nachleben, Ikonographie und Hermeneutik”, in Das Münster: Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 2, 2017, p. 136-150; “Kairos. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics”, in Iconographica: Rivista di Iconografia Medievale e Moderna, 16, 2017, p. 72-93.

Nicholas is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University. His research interests include political cultures and languages of Renaissance republicanism, court culture in sixteenth-century Florence, and, most recently, gambling and other risk-taking behaviors in Renaissance Italy. His publications include The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480-1550 (2013) and articles in Past & Present, Renaissance Quarterly, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Renaissance Studies, and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. In 2013-14 he was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Nicholas’s current research explores attitudes toward, and understandings about, financial risk taking and thinking about the future in sixteenth-century Italy. The project examines the interaction between beliefs about fortuna, occasio, and providence and behavior in daily life in the realms of commerce and gambling.

J.K. Barret is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England, is under contract with Cornell University Press. In it, she investigates Renaissance literary constructions of the future, the complex relations between futurity and narrative, and the emergence of novel accounts of Englishness that turn on looking to the future rather than the past in the works of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton. 

Her current research continues to examine questions of time, and aims to trace how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors invented new ways of conceptualizing and interpreting time. She is interested in how the notion of kairos developed—recovering such period sensitivities to temporality enables us to revise our assumptions about the terms of literature’s intervention into emerging ethical and aesthetic categories.

Add some more info about this item...

Valentina is a current MA student in Cultural and Intellectual History 1300-1650 at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Iconography and Iconology from the University of Bologna. In her dissertation, Sogni d’ombra. Tempus, Humana Fragilitas e Occasio nelle arti figurative del XVII secolo, she focused her research on the allegorical representation of Time. Its cyclical and universal scroll, the way it discloses moral truths and the way it offers and takes off the appropriate times to man.

Her interest in Occasio and Kairos revolves around how Christian art re-interpreted the two pagan entities of Time and Opportunity through the analysis of Theodoor Galle’s engravings. These engravings were made for the text Occasio Arrepta. Neglecta. Huius commode: illius incommode(1605) written by the Dutch Jesuit Joannes David.

Matthew Champion is a Jeremy Haworth Research Fellow in history at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge.  Matthew holds a BA, BMus, and an MA in history from the University of Melbourne. He completed his doctoral studies on perceptions and experiences of time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries at Queen Mary University of London in 2013. He is currently writing a monograph on fifteenth-century temporalities, and combing the archives for a new book on sonic cultures of time from 1300 to 1600.

Matthew's interest in kairos and occasio centres on their relationships with liturgical temporalities, the historiography and politics of the fifteenth-century Burgundian territories, and the iconography and metaphorics of medieval and early modern clocks.

Simona Cohen is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History at Tel-Aviv university. She continues to lecture on Renaissance Art at TAU today, and to explore Renaissance depictions of time in her own research, an interest which began with her PhD on iconography in the illustrations of Petrarch's Trionfo del Tempo. In 2010 she was Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (in Florence) and in 2011 she taught at the International University in Venice.

Simona’s second book, Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art, was published in 2014, and contains a chapter which explores ‘Kairos/Occasio:  Vicissitudes of Propitious Time from Antiquity to the Renaissance’.

Alexander is an historian and philosopher of early modern magic, emotions, and culture. He acquired his doctorate from the University of Bristol, where his doctoral research examined magical approaches to the passions in seventeenth-century England. In 2013, he published his first book, The Starry Rubric: Seventeenth-century English Astrology and Magic. He has also contributed chapters on early modern millenarianism, the material history of amulets, magic in the early American colonies, and ecological dimensions of occult philosophy. His research interests include astrology, love magic, grimoires, cunning folk, and necromancy.

Al’s interest in kairos began in examining the economic, political, social and medical utilities of astrological election – the analysis of the heavens to discover a particularly opportune moment at which astral influences best assisted the beginnings of a project. From there he has become increasingly fascinated with occult approaches to time, especially as relates to epistemology, affect, and phenomenology.

Allegra completed her PhD in cultural history at the University of Cambridge in spring 2016 and recently spent 3 months as a visiting researcher in British Studies at the University of Oslo. Her PhD explored alternative conceptions of time and temporality in European modernism, c.1890-1940, across Britain, France, Germany, America, and Italy. Her current work involves expanding her dissertation as a monograph, illustrating how four ‘modalities’ or conceptions of time during this period presented significant challenges to linear or Newtonian ’clock-time’ in philosophy, psychology music, theatre/film, and science fiction.

Her new postdoctoral project, ‘Chromanticism: sounding colour / colouring sound, 1890-1930’  explores the meanings and beliefs associated with ‘colour-organs’ and ‘colour-music’, seeking to understand how scientific perspectives in the physics of light, colour, cognition, and sensation informed contemporary aesthetic and musical understandings of colour, and how a visual definition of colour changes when viewed through a multisensory phenomenon like synaesthesia. This project will develop her discussion of spiritualist and theosophical understandings of time in her PhD by adding another dimension (sound and colour) to the ‘invisible’ universe of time.

Grigol (BA, MA, M. Res) is a Doctoral Researcher at the European University Institute, Florence. Grigol read History BA at the University of Bristol and received an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of London (Queen Mary/University College London).

As part of his doctoral studies, he is currently studying temporal perceptions in early modern Europe, 1500 - 1650.

Anders Göranzon is an Honorary Lecturer in Practical Theology/Ministerial Studies, seconded by Church of Sweden to the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He also lectures at the Lutheran Theological Institute, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

He holds a PhD from the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa in Ecclesiology with the title: “The Prophetic Voice of the SACC after 1990 – Searching for a Renewed Kairos”. He has also published articles on ecumenism and sexuality.

He is presently working in the area of reconciliation and gender and constantly draws inspiration from the South African Kairos Document albeit critically.

Patrick is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and editor of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance.He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and English from the University of Manchester, an M.A. from Queen Mary, University of London, and an M.Litt. from the Scottish Institute of Northern Renaissance Studies, under whose aegis he also gained his Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde in 2012, with a thesis on the Petrarchan mode in Scottish and English poetry in the wake of the Union of the Crowns of 1603. He is (slowly) revising this for publication. He also has wider interests in Italian literature and culture, and his co-translation of Elsa Morante's long poem, La canzone degli F.P. e degli I.M. in tre parti (The song of the H.F. and the U.M., in three parts) was published by Transference in 2008.

Patrick’s interest in Kairos derives from his investigations into Metanoia, the veiled goddess of repentance commonly depicted lurking behind Kairos’ shoulder. Examining depictions of metanoia from Ausonius to Foucault, he has become increasingly convinced that kairos cannot be properly grasped without a meaningful engagement with metanoia as a rhetorical, mythological, theological and philosophical phenomenon.

Stephanie Heremans is a PhD student in Art History at KU Leuven. Stephanie is working on the project “Kairós, or the Right Moment. Nachleben and Iconology”, supervised by Professor Barbara Baert (KU Leuven) in collaboration with Professor Han Lamers (University of Oslo / KU Leuven). This research initiative, which deals with the reception of kairós in the visual medium from antiquity to the Renaissance by combining perspectives from classical reception studies and iconology, is funded by KU Leuven (2018–22).

Stephanie’s main research focus lies on the meaning of kairós and fortuna in the work of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and the early Warburgian School.

Erin Kathleen Kelly is a doctoral student currently completing her dissertation, "'Fortune's ever changing face' in Early Modern Literature and Thought," at Rutgers University. The dissertation analyzes representations of fortune in Renaissance literature to show how writers revived this ancient concept, variously associated with chance, economic prosperity, and fate, to reconcile seemingly irrational occurrences with their belief in the potential for rational explanation.

Her interest in kairos and occasio revolves around the conflation of these figures with fortune, particularly the ways that such figures produce categories of moral judgment and epistemologies suited to contingent reasoning in politics, science, economics, and ethics.

Han Lamers is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, and the History of Art and Ideas of the University of Oslo. He is the author of Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015) and, together with Bettina Reitz-Joosse, The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text of Italian Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016 & 2017). Together with Barbara Baert (KU Leuven), he set up the research initiative “Kairós, or the Right Moment: Nachleben and Iconology”. In this context, he studies the early modern lexicography of kairós and the relationship between the notions of kairós and Nachleben in modern scholarship. More information can be found here.

Clint Le Bruyns is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Development, and Director of the Theology and Development Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is also adjunct professor at Eastern University, USA. His area of expertise is in public theology and ethics.

Research interests include theories of responsibility, economic ethics, theology of work, responsible citizenship, Paul Tillich, H Richard Niebuhr, and the role of churches in public life. He co-edited The Humanization of Globalization (Germany, 2008), Ragbag Theologies (South Africa, 2009), and Teologia Pública no Brasil e na África do Sul (Brazil, 2014).

Clint’s theological work on kairos revolves around discourses and modes of public responsibility, with special attention to the Kairos Documents of South Africa (1985) and Palestine (2009). 

Russell Re Manning is a philosopher of religion with wide-ranging research and teaching interests in modern and contemporary philosophy and theology. Dr Re Manning is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Ethics at Bath Spa University and Visiting Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He was co-chair of the American Academy of Religion Group 'Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture' and is past-President of the North American Paul Tillich Society.

His research engages four related areas: the intellectual history of natural theology; theologies of culture; philosophy of religion; and topics in science and religion. Current projects include work on contemporary revivals of natural theology, an introduction to the thought of Paul Tillich, an analysis of the use of the concept of emergence in Christian theology, and an edition of the Complete Works of Paul Tillich in English.

Alan is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. He is a an Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and consultant musicologist to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. As a singer, he has worked with Opera Australia and as a freelance performer specializing in music of the early modern period.

His doctoral research explored the influence of classical rhetoric on singers’ performance practice in Italian opera of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in the delivery of dialogue in recitative. He is interested in the implications of kairos for musical timing, and the connections between kairos and decorum.

Alexis McCrossen is Professor of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  Broadly speaking her interest in kairos arises out of investigations into time consciousness in the United States between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.  Alexis’s present research into the history of New Year’s observances in the United States provides her with the opportunity to consider the implications of kairos and chronos.  In a book tentatively titled Resolutions and Revelry: New Year’s Observances in the United States, she considers a range of singular events fashioned to herald the new year, while putting to rest the old one. In doing so, Alexis is thinking about how the New Year brings with it the opportunity to reflect on the passage and meaning of time.  She is the author of Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Cornell University Press, 2000) and Marking Modern Times: Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Alexis also edited and contributed to Land of Desire: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2009).  

Bernhard Schirg is a researcher at the Dept for Mediaeval and Neo-Latin Philology at the Freie Universität, Berlin. In his research, Bernhard shows great interest in establishing new accesses to unpublished material. In his current Berlin project, he studies the influence which the monumental Atlantica (4 vols., 1679-1702) by the Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck exerted on European scholarship.

Bernhard's interest in kairos is twofold. In his Göttingen PhD-thesis (2014), he edited an extensive poem of praise dedicated to the Borgia-pope Alexander VI and also studied the techniques neo-Latin poets applied to deliver their works on time, thus seizing the ideal moment of dedication. Besides, he is currently preparing an edition and translation of Mario Equicola's De opportunitate (On opportunity) that will appear in Harvard's I Tatti-series (ca. 2017). This neo-Latin dialogue revolves around cardinal Ippolito d'Este's private impresa, which visually conveys the maxim to always seize the right moment. 

Melissa is a courtesy Visiting Professor at Marquette University and faculty member at an all-girls school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her publications focus on both metaphysical and ethical issues in ancient Greek, modern, and contemporary Continental philosophy. She also has abiding interests in education and social justice, and currently is working on a book manuscript, Philosophy For Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought.

Melissa's interest in kairos began at the University of Oregon with her dissertation on chance in ancient Greek philosophy (2008). She is most interested in kairos as it solicits other key ideas--necessity, chance, fortune, time--as well as how the idea itself develops through the history of Western philosophy.

Gary Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the University of Richmond. He has published widely on Nietzsche and Foucault. His most recent book is Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (University of Chicago Press, 2003). 

Prof Shapiro will be exploring the renewal  of the concept of kairos, its variations, and implications in political philosophy after Nietzsche, including the work of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou.

Tina is Associate Professor of British literature at the University of Oslo. Her postdoctoral project on Time and Aesthetic Value in Early Modern Literature was funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2010-2012). She became interested in kairos while doing research on Renaissance emblems as a Visiting Scholar with the University of California, Berkeley. What is the relation between Occasio and Festina lente, the principle of hurrying slowly? Combining perspectives from rhetoric, emblem studies and book history, Tina is currently working on a book on The Value of Time in Early Modern Literature. The monograph explores writers’ sense of time and haste in the period from c. 1580 to 1720, with primary emphasis on the seventeenth century. An article based on the monograph appeared in Studies in Philology in 2014 (“Margaret Cavendish and the Stigma of Haste”). She has also published work on John Donne and John Dryden, in addition to co-editing a volume on Rhetoric and the Royal Society: A Sourcebook (2014, with Ryan J. Stark).

Robert is an Professor of Communication Studies at Ithaca College. He has also taught at Emerson College, the University of Maryland, and Boston University.  He received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. The major focus of his research has been the Greco-Roman rhetorical treatise tradition, upon which he has published widely, and in the history of that that tradition's reception. In Fall 2017 Brill and ISHR will publish his Thomas Elyot: Four Texts on the Rhetoric of Counsel: Critical Editions of Doctrinal of Princes (1533), Pasquill the Playne (1533), Of the Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man (1533), and The Defence of Good Women (1540), a work co-authored with Professor Arthur Walzer. He is currently working on a major project, a monograph reconstructing the techne rhetorike of the 'Attic orator' Isocrates. Robert also has active research interests in argumentation and the contemporary problem of propaganda.

Robert's interest in kairos was stimulated by his study of Isocrates, and by the controversies which broke out around the use of that term in Classical antiquity. Isocrates and his critics, most particularly Alcidamas, understood that kairos stood at the nexus of a cluster of interrelated concepts, including prudence, genre, and counsel, that would be central to virtually all subsequent rhetorical theory.

Laura Tack is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leuven, where she completed a doctorate in theology (Research Unit Biblical Studies, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies). She is currently working on the project “Kairós, or the Right Moment: Nachleben and Iconology” funded by the University of Leuven (2018–22). Laura has published on the hermeneutics of the Gospel of John, the visual imagery for revelation in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence and the Wirkungsgeschichte of biblical themes in the visual culture. As a biblical scholar and art historian, she has a keen interest in the changing conceptions of time in early Christianity.

She is presently writing a book about kairós from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on the transformative influence of Christianity on the ancient Greek understanding of kairós in the art and the theology of the early patristic period and the Middle Ages.

Cesar is independent researcher at the State University of São Paulo where he develops the Research Group on Renaissance and Contemporary Music – GreCo –that receives a four-year grant by The São Paulo Research Foundation, Fapesp. He obtained the Soloist Diploma in recorder at The Royal Conservatory in The Hague, The Netherlands (1998). He concluded his PhD degree at the University of East Anglia, UK, with the thesis The Discourse of Free Improvisation: A Rhetorical Perspective on Free Improvised Music and completed his post-doctoral research at the University of São Paulo in 2012 with a study entitled Kairos and the Interactivity of Contemporary Improvisation.

His interest in kairos is on its perspective as a rhetorical virtue aimed to aid pragmatically in the performance of the music repertoire of the Renaissance polyphony, contemporary music and free improvisation.

Belinda Walzer is Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department's Writing Program and Director of the Writing Center at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Her research coalesces rhetorical theory, human rights discourse, and gender studies, exploring the pedagogical impulse that underwrites the human rights regime and examining how global fictional and non-fictional narratives, as cultural productions, both perform and remake a normative culture of human rights. Belinda is currently working on a manuscript and two book chapters that consider how temporal invention, specifically kairos and akairos, renders normativity and thus (il)legibility within gendered conventions of human rights discourse. 

Belinda’s work on kairos began with a co-published article in College Literature (2013), which utilizes theories of kairos and contemporary comics studies to demonstrate how Joe Sacco’s graphic narratives disrupt temporal and spatial tropes of human rights claims. Since then, she has broadened her interest in what rhetorical theories of temporality can offer human rights by examining both the opportune and the inopportune moment and what they reveal about traumatic time.

What's this item about? What makes it interesting? Write a catchy description to grab your audience's attention...

Penelope Woods is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Western Australia where she specializes in the history of theatre audience affect. Penelope works on the recuperation of immaterial culture through material culture histories of space and objects to better understand the operation of social emotion. She has looked in particular at: gesture, facial expression and voice. Her PhD research into spectatorship and architecture was carried out in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe. She has a co-authored chapter on young audiences today in Shakespeare in Practice: The Audience (2013) and a chapter on seventeenth century audiences in Moving Shakespeare Indoors (2014).

Penelope is currently exploring the hybridization of the figure of Fortuna with the figure of Occasion in the early modern period, to think about the early modern theatre industry and particularly the Fortune playhouse.