Kinesic Intelligence in the Humanities

This research collection showcases how kinesic intelligence is fundamental to human communication and our ability to produce complex meaning, exploring its manifestations across a range of humanities disciplines, and connecting our past with our social and cultural future.

The book defines kinesic intelligence as a higher-order intellectual competence that allows human beings to interact and grow cognitively and intersubjectively through sensorimotricity and interpersonal movement. Understood in this way, kinesic intelligence can offer insights into the development of humans’ meaning-making abilities and, in turn, society and culture more broadly. Recognizing the power of the humanities in furthering sociocultural development, the collection features perspectives from scholars across a range of topics, including the multimodality of language acquisition in children; young adults in clinical psychology and medical humanities; nonverbal communication in history; legal language and reasoning; literature and cognitive studies; the internet and multispecies anthropology; and sensoriality in history and art.

Foregrounding the impact of the humanities in promoting new understandings of human intelligence, this volume will be of interest to scholars in cognitive legal and literary studies, multimodality, anthropology, history, medical humanities, and those with an interest in the real-world impact of the humanities.

Guillemette Bolens is Professor of Medieval and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is the author of several books, including The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) and Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the Dynamics of Gesture (OUP, 2021). Her work has been published in Poetics Today, Cahiers de narratologie, Studia Neophilologica, and Cogent Arts & Humanities.