Josefa Ros Velasco

Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco is Associate 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 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 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.