Overview
Maya Kronfeld is Assistant Professor of Theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Philosophy Department and the Music Department. After completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Kronfeld was the Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. Her book project, Spontaneous Form: Philosophy, Literature, Jazz integrates studies of literary Romanticism and Modernism with Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to the philosophy of mind and Black Music Studies. Her work appears in Radical Philosophy, Review of English Studies, Jazz & Culture, Philosophy and Literature, Boundary 2, Political Concepts, the Cambridge Guide to Kant and Literary Studies, and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, and Toni Morrison in Context.
Kronfeld's research areas of focus include Literature and Philosophy, Aesthetics and Literary Theory, Hume, Kant, William James, Bertrand Russell, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, English and French Romanticism and Modernism, Jazz and Black Music Studies, African-American Literature, Philosophy of Mind, Critical Epistemology, Cognitive Metaphor Theory.
Publications:
“The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno, Jazz and the Politics of Metric Regularity,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 5 (Autumn, 2019): 34-47.https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-philosophers-bass-drum
“Spontaneity,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (Literature Edition), no. 7 (June 2025). https://www.politicalconcepts.org/spontaneity-maya-kronfeld/
“‘The Shapes My Brain Holds’: Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf’s The Waves,” in Kant and Literary Studies, ed. Claudia Brodsky. Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy, edited by Tony Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 244-274. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071611.014
“The Indispensability of Form: A Kantian Approach to Philosophy and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, ed. R. Lanier Anderson and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press).
“Immanuel Kant,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, ed. Martin Kreiswirth, Imre Szeman, Cymene Howe and Andrew Pendakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press).
“Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity,” Jazz and Culture 4, no. 2 (Winter 2021):14-22, special issue on “Jazz in the Present Tense,” eds. Kimberly Hannon Teal, Fumi Okiji, Kwami Coleman, and Nate Sloan. https://doi.org/10.5406/jazzculture.4.2.0014.
“‘Prufrock’ between Acquaintance and Description: Bertrand Russell and T.S. Eliot,” Philosophy and Literature 47, no. 1 (April 2023): 167-183.https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2023.a899684
“What is Holding Us Together? David Hume, Edgar Allan Poe and the Problem of Association,” Review of English Studies 73, no. 312 (November 2022): 934-953. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac034
“Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge,” b2o: boundary 2 online 7, no. 2 (May 2025), special issue (Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm,” ed. Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal. https://www.boundary2.org/2025/05/maya-kronfeld-rhythmic-concepts-and-new-knowledge/
“Listening, Elsewhere and Otherwise: A Collective Listening to Shana L. Redmond’s ‘The Dark Prelude,’” Journal of Popular Music Studies 36, no. 4 (2024): 5-24. Ed. Sara Marcus, with Shana L. Redmond, Derek Baron, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Matthew Morrison, and Juno Richards. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.4.5
