Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco is Postdoctoral Fellow at Complutense University of Madrid. She is conducting a multidisciplinary research on the evolutionary role of boredom from a philosophical-anthropological point of view to argue against the spread understanding of boredom as a pathological personality trait whereby medicalization of such a common, daily annoyance is legitimized. As part of this approach, she is examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of a mental disease has gradually formed historically as a result of the act of taking at face value the metaphor of boredom as an illness, especially represented in nineteenth-century Western literature and philosophy. She was Associate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2019). She is editor and author of the books Feminism. Past, Present, and Future Perspectives (New York, 2017); Contemporary Approaches in Philosophical and Humanistic Thought (Rome, 2017); and Hans Blumenberg. Literatura, estética y nihilismo (Madrid, 2016), and academic papers such as “Hans Blumenbergs’ Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom” (2018), “Boredom: humanizing or dehumanizing treatment” (2018); or “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (2017). She is currently working in her next book: History of boredom. The way towards the pathologization of boredom and its alternatives. In the future, she would like to lead a research project on boredom in old age and the improvement of seniors’ quality of life in old people’s homes by paying attention to the phenomenon of boredom.
