Overview

This book collects the lifelong research on boredom by American psychologist Augustin de la Peña (1942-2021). It focuses on the experience of boredom—and other similar states, including ennui, melancholy, laziness, interest, attention, and entertainment—and its associated behaviors. Offering an interdisciplinary chronicle of boredom, from Antiquity to the present, special attention is paid to its daily experience as a ubiquitous phenomenon that informs cultural and political actions that continue to shape our society. Dr. de la Peña describes the obsolescence of the Western Commonsense View of Reality to propose a Developmental Psychophysiological Approach to Reality, reconceptualizing boredom. The book theorizes the condition as both logical and emotional, an axis that has defined the sensibility of the modern era. This is a volume edited posthumously by Josefa Ros Velasco and Christian Parreno in homage to Augustin’s work and his invaluable contribution to the establishment of the field of boredom studies.

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9783031326844

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Augustin de la Peña was born December 28, 1942, in Brownsville, Texas. He graduated in psychology from the University of Texas, Austin, with a minor in mathematics, and held a PhD, Cum Laude, from Stanford University. His doctorate focused on cognitive developmental psychology and developmental sleep-wake psychophysiology. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in the psychology and psychophysiology of boredom and interest, entertainment, arousal, alertness, sleepiness, and fatigue. With more than 30 years of clinical and research experience in sleep disorders, he served as director of sleep disorder centers in California and Texas. He also taught for 15 years in medical schools. Throughout his career, he wrote more than 50 academic publications, including The Psychobiology of Cancer: Automation and Boredom in Health and Disease (Praeger, 1983). Josefa Ros Velasco is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she leads the project “Pre-Bored. Well-being and Prevention of Boredom in Spanish Nursing Homes”. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Distinguished Junior Scholars program. She is a specialist in boredom studies, and the president of the International Society of Boredom Studies. She is the author of The Disease of Boredom (Alianza Editorial, 2022), and editor of Suicide in Modern Literature (Springer, 2021), The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2020), The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2020), and Boredom Is in Your Mind (Springer, 2019). She is the recipient of the Spanish National Research Prize (2022) and the Lincoln Book Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Service at Harvard University (2019). Christian Parreno is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. His research explores conditions of boredom and sameness in the ideation and experience of the modern built environment. He is the author of Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience (Bloomsbury, 2021); and his writings have appeared in Architectural Histories; Architecture & Culture; Emotions: History, Culture, Society; Log; The Journal of Architecture; The Journal of Architectural Education; The Journal of Boredom Studies; Textual Practice; and several edited volumes.

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