Sleep Cultures
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PictureBedroom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. With permission of the 78 Derngate Northampton Trust.
If any biological phenomenon would seem to transcend culture, it is sleep.  And yet, how, when, where and why one sleeps has varied dramatically over time and across societies, as sleeping habits depend upon a range of economic, technological and socio-ideological factors.  For these reasons, sleep is a cultural as well as a biological event.

Sleep Cultures is an internet resource for scholarship conducted in a range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines, including literature, anthropology, history, art history, and sociology.  Our hope is that this site will serve as a meeting place for researchers from varied backgrounds, a forum for their work, and an introduction to some of the people and ideas central to a vibrant field of interdisciplinary inquiry. 

This site features a regularly updated bibliography of scholarship on sleep produced in a range of disciplines; brief introductions to the work of sleep researchers and their projects; an image archive of objects and artworks that focus on sleep; and a blog that directs readers to "current events" in the world of sleep study.

Sleep Cultures is the web-child of three English professors, Michael Greaney, Hilary Hinds, and Garrett Sullivan, with a keen interest in sleep; Ben Parris is the site's Images Curator.  We recognize that we can't do justice to the various disciplines whose work we hope to represent on this site.  Consequently, we hope that readers will help us make the site better.  Please use the "Contact Us" page to suggest entries for the bibliography, to direct us to sleep researchers not represented here, or to provide items for our "News and Notes" feature.