Presentation

Guillemette Bolens holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Geneva. She spent a year at Cornell University on a research fellowship. She taught Medieval English Literature as an assistant and “maître-assistante” before being appointed full professor at the University of Geneva in 2005. Her research interests are in the history of the body and corporeal logics in classical, medieval, and contemporary literatures. Her current research project focuses on kinesics and the analysis of gestures, postures, movements, and facial expressions in visual and verbal arts. This interdisciplinary project links the fields of narratology and rhetoric (in literature), gesture studies (in sociology and anthropology), action understanding (in philosophy and psychology), embodied cognition (in neuroscience), and kinesthetic semiotics (in dance theory).