Boredom Is in Your Mind

Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco is Associate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow. She is conducting a multidisciplinary research on the evolution of the understanding of boredom as a mental pathology. As part of this approach, she is examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of a mental disease has gradually formed historically by paying attention to philosophical, theological, and literary narratives. Dr. Ros Velasco holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy with International Mention at the Excellent Program of Doctorate in Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education. Her Dissertation was entitled Boredom as a Selective Pressure in Hans Blumenberg, with which she got the Extraordinary Doctorate Award (2016-2017). MA in Contemporary Thinking and MA in Teachers Training. Shewas visiting researcher at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung at Stuttgart Universität (IZKT, Germany) as a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholar, and at the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv Marbach (DLA, Germany) as a DLA fellow. She is a member of the Research Groups Saavedra Fajardo Library for Hispanic Political Thought at the UCM; History and Video Games at the University of Murcia; and History and Philosophy of Emotions at CCHS-CSIC. She is the editor and the author of academic papers such as “Hans Blumenbergs’ Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom” (Karl Alber, 2018), “Boredom: humanising or dehumanising treatment” (Vernon, 2018); or “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (Thémata, 2017). She is currently working on her next books: La enfermedad del aburrimiento. El camino de la medicalización y sus alternativas, The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2019), and The Faces of Depression inLiterature (Peter Lang, 2019).

• Chapter 1: Is it a Good Thing To Be Bored?.- Chapter 2: The Unbearable Lightness of Boredom: A Pragmatic Meaning-Regulation Hypothesis.- Chapter 3: Boredom: Managing the Delicate Balance between Exploration and Exploitation.- Chapter 4: Boredom Is A Feeling of Thinking and a Double-Edged Sword.- Chapter 5: Boredom and Psychoanalysis.-  Chapter 6: The Transformative Potential of Boredom.- Chapter 7: Heidegger on Creativity: From Boredom to Reengagement with the World.- Chapter 8: Facing Boredom: Essential Indexicals and Narratives of the Self.- Chapter 9: Animal Boredom.- Chapter 10: The Helix Center Roundtable on Boredom (New York, April 2018).