Mark Kingwell is renowned for engaging subjects as varied as liberal-democratic theory, moral philosophy, communication studies, aesthetics, and cultural studies in accessible ways that resonate and enlighten. He is currently professor of philosophy and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has previous held visiting posts at Cambridge University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, and City University of New York. Between 2001 and 2004, he was chair of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. To date he is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and eighteen books of political, cultural, and aesthetic theory including A Civil Tongue (1995), the national bestsellers vBetter Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), Glenn Gould (2009), and Measure Yourself Against the Earth. In 2018, Kingwell was named a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in both Canada and the United Kingdom. His book Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface was published in April 2019.
Mark Kingwell on Boredom and the Interface
The Interface is not restricted to any given program, app, or platform. It is, rather, the very idea of how we interact with the world in every sense. With this in mind, philosopher and writer Mark Kingwell explores the nature of boredom, identifying differences between its neoliberal and philosophical manifestations—a topic in his new book and one he’ll take up during his April 17 Walker lecture.