A BBC News report on a Swiss study demonstrating a "lunar influence" upon how we sleep.  "There is such a strong cultural story around the full Moon that it would not be surprising if it has an effect."

Earlier this summer, the University of Surrey hosted a roundtable on this topic. Notes on the event can be found here.  

The Harper's Magazine blog The Stream offers a precis of a handful of short essays on sleep from the August issue of Harper's, including one by noted sleep historian A. Roger Ekirch.

Attached is an interview with Ricky Lehner, one of the Occupy DC protesters who in January 2012 embarked on a 'sleep strike' as a protest against a DC Park Police ban on sleeping in McPherson Square. 57 hours into his ordeal of self-inflicted sleep deprivation, Lehner talks with remarkable lucidity about the rationale behind his protest. According to the "ODC Sleeps" twitter feed, he held out for over 100 hours.

The issue of parent-infant bed-sharing -- or co-sleeping -- has been controversial in the United States.  Notre Dame University anthropologist James McKenna has studied how this issue pits social prescriptions for appropriate sleeping behavior against the biological needs of mother and child.  He is the director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory, which "studies how sleeping environments reflect and respond to family needs -- in particular how they affect mothers, breastfeeding, and infants' physiological and psychological well-being and development."  You can find the website for the Sleep Laboratory here.  

Healthy Living in Pre-Modern Europe. 
The Theory and Practice of the Six Non-Naturals (c.1400-1700)

Conference Venue: Institute of Historical Research, Bloomsbury, London.

Conference Dates: 13-14 September 2013

This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on topics related to the role played by the six Non-Naturals in health maintenance in the late-medieval and early modern period.  It is well-known that health was thought to depend on the regulation of the six key factors affecting body functions: the air one breathes, sleep, food and drink, evacuations, movement and emotions.

For further information, please see the cfp

A video interview (click this link) with Garrett Sullivan (English, Penn State University) by Peter Hegarty (Psychology, Univ. of Surrey).

Has there been a 'turn' to sleep matters in the humanities and social sciences in recent years? This question opens a richly thought-provoking debate on the Somatosphere website between Professor Simon Williams (Warwick) and Professor Matthew Wolf-Meyer (California, Santa Cruz) on the state of play in sleep studies. 'Longing for Sleep: Assessing the Place of Sleep in the 21st Century' is accessible here: http://somatosphere.net/series/longing-for-sleep

Imagining Sleep: An Interdisciplinary Course on Sleep & Dream is a rich online resource created by Dr Carolyn Fay, whose doctoral research was on sleep in nineteenth-century French literature. The site contains a series of podcasts (or 'somniloquies') on sleep and dreaming, plus directed study activities, an interdisciplinary bibliography, and a glossary of sleep related terms. http://imaginingsleep.com