Hannah Ahlheim is a graduate of the Humboldt University of Berlin (MA 2002) and the Ruhr-University of Bochum (PhD 2008). After five years at the University in Berlin she is now teaching as Assistant Professor in Modern History at the University of Göttingen. Her current research project is titled “The sleep of our dreams. Phantasies of optimization, limits of control, and the understanding of sleep in Germany and the US (1880-1980)”. It deals with the ways in which modern western societies tried to incorporate the “mystery of sleep” into a world allegedly ruled by rationality and shaped by the requirements of industrialization. She has published several articles about the history of sleep in the “long” 20th century. Hannah Ahlheim’s broader research interests also include the history of the social and history of sciences in general, National Socialism, German-Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism during the 19th and 20th century. Hannah is the writer and presenter of The Sleep of Our Dreams, a five-episode documentary on the history of sleep in the "long twentieth century".
Joanne Bailey (Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University) is currently working on a history of British manliness from 1750 to 1918. Her publications are on parents: Parenting in England 1760-1830: emotions, identity, and generation (OUP, 2012) and marriage: Unquiet Lives: marriage and marriage breakdown in England 1660-1800 (CUP, 2003). It is her work on family life that has inspired her to carry out research on beds, their uses and meaning in the early modern household. With Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum), she has explored the gendered aspects of activities in and around beds, and the ways in which marital beds symbolised the heart of domestic life. Her more recent work on ideals of manliness has prompted her to think about the ways that sleep was often a marker of manly characteristics in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Too much sleep indicated unmanly over-indulgent behaviour, while restricted sleep was understood to be part of a hard working, manly lifestyle.
Steffan Blayney is a PhD candidate in History at Birkbeck, University of London. His Wellcome Trust-funded project examines fatigue research, and the medicine and politics of work in Britain from 1914 to 1945. He is interested in the development of fatigue as an object of medical research, and in the significances attached to the fatigued working body across a range of discourses. His work looks at the institutional contexts in which medical knowledge of fatigue was produced, and the arenas in which this knowledge was in turn negotiated politically and culturally, from trade union campaigns for holidays with pay to the future worlds imagined by writers of utopian and dystopian fiction. Contact: sblayn01@mail.bbk.ac.uk
Dorothy Bruck (Professor of Psychology, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia) has had a keen interest in sleep research for over three decades and conducted sleep laboratory, questionnaire and interview-based studies around daytime sleepiness disorders, insomnia and arousal thresholds in emergencies. She has recently moved to work within Victoria University's Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing and is working to understand more about sleep in the context of culture and ethnicity. Recently, with doctoral student McLytton Clever, she published a paper comparing sleep quality, sleepiness and sleep beliefs of black Zimbabwean and Ghanaian immigrants with Australian non-immigrants (South African Journal of Psychology). This study was unique in that, unlike other studies of 'minority' groups, there were no SES or mental/physical health differences between the groups and no differences in sleepiness, sleep quality or quantity were found. The finding was consistent with the idea that, where such differences have been found, they have arisen from confounding social and economic factors. The research did find, however, that the immigrant groups were less likely to recognise psychological factors as having a possible role in insomnia. Dorothy is just embarking on a study of the sleep of Sudanese refugees in Australia and is particularly interested in whether cultural differences in sleep behaviours and sleep beliefs have implications for the treatment of insomnia in individuals from non-Western cultures.
Emily Buffey is a PhD candidate in English at The University of Birmingham. Emily's PhD thesis, 'The Early Modern Dream Vision: 1540-1625' is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and investigates the role of the 'Chaucerian' dream vision in English poetry of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, particularly for writers and readers of the 'middle sort'. By focusing on the bedchamber or scholar's study as an important site of textual production, her thesis draws on recent research into the material conditions of literate practice, the physiology of reading, sleep and dreams, and the influence of medieval writers in the Tudor period. Emily's project contributes to current scholarly debates on early modern material culture, the politics of print, historical periodization and the English literary canon. Her research interests also include: sixteenth-century prose fiction, early modern women's writing and the history of reading. Contact: EXB593@bham.ac.uk
Elisha Cohn (Assistant Professor of English, Cornell University) is currently working on a book entitled Still Life: Suspended Agency in the Victorian Novel, which examines representations of reverie, trance and sleep in the nineteenth century. She argues that Victorian novelists significantly shifted their conception of the form and purpose of their art when they began to narrate states of attenuated awareness. Her publications include "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" in Nineteenth Century Literature (2010) and "Still Life: Charlotte Brontë's Suspended Animation" in SEL (2012), which contends that Brontë promotes "sleep-reading"—a non-vigilant experience of encountering art that enables unregulated sensations and unaccustomed affinities—that refuses the purposes of Bildung or self-formation.
Katharine Craik, Reader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, is a Shakespearean by day and a librettist by night. She is Principal Investigator of a project entitled Watching (the Renaissance term for insomnia) funded by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust. At the heart of the project is a new opera for children on the science of sleep that was performed in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, in March 2015. Details of the opera, and the Watching project’s other activities, can be found here: http://www.watching.eca.ed.ac.uk
Alan Derickson (Professor of Labor Studies and History, Penn State) explores working-class semi-consciousness and unconsciousness, especially in its relationship to derangements of working time. Thus far his work has focused on male workers whose overextended wakefulness reflects, in varied ways, unhealthful standards of masculinity. Recent publications include Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and “’No Such Thing as a Night’s Sleep’: The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men from World War II to the Present,” Journal of Social History (2013). Another piece from this project, “’Asleep and Awake at the Same Time’: Sleep Denial among Pullman Porters,” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (2008), won the C. L. R. James Award of the Working Class Studies Association as the best article in the field for 2007-8. Derickson became interested in the fraught relations of sleep and work while observing his wife’s medical internship, a primitive trial designed to produce indefatigable supermen.
A. Roger Ekirch (Professor of History, Virginia Tech) was drawn to the topic of sleep in the course of researching his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (W.W. Norton, 2005), for which he received a Guggenheim fellowship (1998). On discovering that the dominant form of human slumber in Western history was “segmented,” he published “Sleep We Have Lost: Preindustrial Slumber in the British Isles” in the American Historical Review (2001). Besides writing two articles with John Shneerson, M.D. on the history of sleep violence in Sleep Medicine Clinics (2011), Ekirch has spoken widely to medical gatherings on the history of segmented sleep and its implications for our understanding of sleep maintenance insomnia. Most recently, he gave a paper on the modernization of sleep at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies Annual Meeting (2013) in Baltimore, and published 'The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?' in Past and Present (2015). His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s Magazine. Further information may be found at www.history.vt.edu/Ekirch.
Claude Fretz is a PhD candidate at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He gained his BA (hons) in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, and his MA English: Shakespeare in History from University College London (UCL). His PhD project, which is being funded by the University of Birmingham’s College of Arts and Law, examines the link between dreams, sleep, and the genres of comedy, tragedy and late play/romance in Shakespeare’s works. It is informed by a historicist methodology, and thus aims to understand the relationship between Early Modern dream/sleep theories and the playwright’s use and appropriation of dramatic genres. Contact: cxf268@bham.ac.uk
Katie Glaskin (Associate Professor, Anthropology, at the University of Western Australia) first became interested in sleep cross-culturally following her ethnographic explorations of the relationship between dreams, creativity and innovation in Indigenous Australian societies. Her publications include the co-edited book Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); ‘Dreams, memory and the ancestors: creativity, culture and the science of sleep,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1):44-62; and ‘Innovation and ancestral revelation: the case of dreams’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2):297-314.
Michael Greaney (Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster University) is currently working on Sleep and the Novel, a study of the representation of sleep and sleep-related states (such as insomnia, trance and sleepwalking) in fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present day. His publications in the field include ‘Sleep in Modern Fiction’, Literature Compass 7:6 (2010), 467-476; ‘Terribly Strange Beds: Conrad, Sleep, and Modernism’, The Conradian 37: 1 (Spring 2012), 1-19; ‘Sleep and Sleep-watching in Dickens: The Case of Barnaby Rudge’, Studies in the Novel 46:1 (Spring 2014), 1-19; and '"Observed, Measured, Contained": Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep', Contemporary Literature 56: 1(March 2015), 56-80. Along with Hilary Hinds and Garrett Sullivan, he is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website.
Gayle Greene is a professor of English at Scripps College, Claremont, California. Her Ph.D. (Columbia) and first publications were on Shakespeare. She teaches Shakespeare, Creative Nonfiction, Contemporary Women Writers, and an interdisciplinary Humanities course on “The Poetry and Science of Sleep.” She’s published several books on women’s fiction and feminist theory. In the 1990s, her interests turned to health and the environment, and she published The Woman Who Knew Too Much (Michigan, 1999), a biography of pioneer British radiation epidemiologist Alice Stewart.
Insomniac (University of California Press, U.S., Little Brown, U.K, 2008) is a first-person account of living with chronic insomnia that combines memoir with scientific inquiry. Greene interviewed hundreds of people who live with insomnia and dozens of people who deal with the problem professionally — researchers, physicians, psychotherapists — and found a striking disconnect between the “experts’” claims that there are “safe and effective” treatments for insomnia and the howl of pain and rage from insomniacs who have found these treatments to be ineffective, costly, and sometimes dangerous, and feel the problem is trivialized by health professionals. Insomniac was shortlisted for the Gregory Bateson Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthopology: a “Shakespeare scholar turns ethnographer, sleep specialist, and science detective in this funny, moving memoir that reveals just how little the contemporary medical community knows about the world of sleeplessness…” The book was Amazon’s “Spotlight” title, March 2008: “a courageous memoir of chronic insomnia interwoven with a fascinating examination of the emerging biological understanding of sleep disorders. Similar in depth and scope to Andrew Solomon's remarkable memoir of depression, The Noonday Demon, Greene courageously and expertly traverses the scientific, socio-cultural, and personal landscape of a little understood illness.” The New England Journal of Medicine described “the presentation of sleep science” as “very impressive and up to date…at a level I would expect to find in a scientific review… If you want an in-depth overview of the patients, the physicians, and the science that are part of the contemporary culture surrounding insomnia, Greene’s book is the best available on the subject” (Fred Turek, Sept 2009, 359, 13, 1412-13).
Greene’s other publications on sleep include:
“The Case for Sleep Medicine,” “Gray Matter,” New York Times, 3/25/12;
“Death’s Brother: A Theogeny of Sleep” (poem), Canadian Medical Association Journal, Jan 2012;
“Why We Can’t Sleep, It’s Not Just in our Heads, But in our Hormones,” Ms Magazine, April/May 2008
Interviews, publications, and CV at http://www.scrippscollege.edu/academics/faculty/gayle-greene.php
and http://sleepstarved.org/
Sasha Handley (University of Manchester) is currently working on a research project that explores perceptions and practices of sleep in Britain between 1660 and 1760. The project investigates a series of 'relocations': spatial, temporal, medical and cultural. She is interested in tracing how these changes reshaped daily practices of sleep in everyday life. The relocation and rearrangement of sleeping environments are traced through the evidence of probate inventories, whilst changing bedtimes are traced through personal testimonies and in relation to religious beliefs and new leisure pursuits. The project explores how new medical understandings of sleep and sleep disorders were used to frame expressions of subjectivity. Sasha’s sleep-related publications include a series of journal articles that examine the relationship between sleeping habits and religious beliefs, practices of sociability, bed-fellowship, and sleepwalking: ‘From the Sacral to the Moral: Sleeping Practices, Household Worship and Confessional Cultures in Late Seventeenth-Century England’ Cultural and Social History 9:1 (2012), 27-46; ‘Sleepwalking, Subjectivity and the Nervous Body in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:3 (2012), 305-323; ‘Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660-1760, History, 98:329 (2013), 79-104
Sasha is completing a monograph on this subject entitled Bedroom Stories in Early Modern England. Funding from the AHRC, the University of Manchester and McGill University supports the research. In March 2012 Sasha co-convened the interdisciplinary workshop Liminal States of Mind with Dr. Peter Garratt and Dr. Anita O’Connell from which a special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas will emerge in 2014-15. Participants examined a wide range of non-conscious states of mind ranging from somnambulism to waking dreams. Sasha is a member of the interdisciplinary research network Dreams and Dreaming coordinated by Dr. Rachael Wiseman of the University of York. Click here for more details: dreamsanddreaming.wordpress.com
Sasha runs annual guided tours of the sleeping chambers at Ham House in Richmond, home of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ham-house/. The tours are entitled Forty Winks: Sleeping Habits through the Ages and they are free to visitors to the house. This year they take place on Saturday 3 August 2013. More information about the tours and about historical sleeping habits can be found on Sasha’s website, which will be launched shortly: www.historiesofsleep.wordpress.com. Regular updates about the history of sleep are tweeted at: @sashahandley on Twitter.
Cressida J. Heyes is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Alberta, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Cornell University Press 2000) and Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press 2007), and the editor of The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Cornell 2003) and Critical Concepts: Philosophy and Gender (Routledge 2011). She co-edited with Meredith Jones a volume of essays called Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (Ashgate 2009), and the two are now co-authoring a book on feminist approaches to sleep. Cressida is especially interested in sleep as a limit on agency, and attempts to manage sleep as attempts to enforce an understanding of agency as continuous action (rather than as capacity); and in the way representations of white femininity as passive and vulnerable interrelate with representations of sleep. She has just completed an essay that offers a phenomenological analysis of the distinctive harms of the rape of unconscious women.
Hilary Hinds (Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University, UK). She is currently writing a cultural history of twin beds, spanning the period from the late nineteenth century, when twin beds were recommended by domestic sanitarians anxious about disease transmission, through early twentieth-century advice books debating the pros and cons of marital bed-sharing, and ending with twin beds’ demise, as a marital ideal of companionship was superseded by one of ‘togetherness’. The project was supported by a Wellcome Trust fellowship in 2011-12, and will culminate in a monograph. A preliminary article, entitled ‘Together and Apart: Twin Beds, Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage’, was published in 2010 in the Journal of Design History (23.3), 275-304. Along with Michael Greaney and Garrett Sullivan, she is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website.
Sandra Huber is a Swiss-Canadian poet and writer. Her book Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014) is based on a 9-month residency at a sleep laboratory via Swiss Artists in Labs, and goes from the premise that any attempt to "solve" the mystery of sleep requires a radical re-framing of what it means to be conscious. The book includes two foldouts of the writer's neural-oscillations-turned-poetry and is prefaced by an essay on the intersections between sleep science, poetry, and technology (http://talonbooks.com/books/assembling-the-morrow). Sandra currently gives lectures with Pop-Up Lab Switzerland (http://www.popuplab.org/arts/science-of-sleep-poetry) and resides in Berlin.
Sarah Kingston received a Ph.D. in English Literature in May 2015 from the University of Rhode Island for a dissertation entitled “Insomnia and Identity: The Discursive Function of Sleeplessness in Modernist Literature,” which explores the conflicting ways in which British and American literature of the Modernist period becomes a battle ground for the purpose and value of insomnia and regulation of sleep. She has also contributed a chapter entitled “The Work of Sleep: Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon” to the forthcoming book War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's “Parade’s End”, Modernism, and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), eds Ashley Chantler and Robin Hawkes. Her research interests include the relationship between insomnia and the production of identity, as well as the role of insomnia in shaping the literary text. She can be contacted at skingston@newhaven.edu.
Kenton Kroker (Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies at York University [Toronto, Canada]) is the author of The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research (University of Toronto Press, 2007). My interest in the history of sleep began with my doctoral study of rapid eye movement (REM), which asked a deceptively simple question: if REM can be witnessed by the naked eye, why was it not until 1953 that this discovery was formally announced? My subsequent studies of sleep's emergence as an object of scientific knowledge have led to publications on psychological practices and relaxation therapy (“The Progress of Introspection in America, 1896–1938,” Studies in History & Philosophy of Biological & Biomedical Sciences 34C (2003): 77–108) and epidemic neurological diseases (“Epidemic Encephalitis & American Neurology, 1919–40,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 108–47). I am currently working on a paper that accounts for the appearance of sleep deprivation experiments in terms of an emerging Republican ideology in early 20th-century France, as well as on a book-length study of the epidemics of encephalitis lethargica, entitled Epidemics Futures: Epidemic Encephalitis and the Twentieth-century Trade in Emerging Diseases.
Pikka-Maaria Laine (Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Lapland, and Adjunct Professor in Strategic Management, University of Eastern Finland) is currently co-authoring (with Prof. Anu Valtonen and Prof. Susan Meriläinen) a paper that critically examines the epistemological assumptions and knowledge production within the intertwined practices of working and sleeping in academia. She is also interested in the mutual entanglement of working, strategy making, resting and sleeping in knowledge intensive companies of the new economy. Theoretically she draws on post-processual and practice theoretical perspectives, and leans on ethnographic, auto-ethnographic and textual material in her studies.
Patrick Levy is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. The title of his thesis is 'A Phenomenology of Sleep'. It aims to offer a comprehensive response to the challenges raised by sleep for the phenomenological tradition, broadly conceived. In particular, the thesis aims to both identify, gather and delimit the phenomenological resources available to key figures within that tradition (with particular focus on Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas), as well as employing such resources, amongst others, to provide the outlines of what 'a phenomenology of sleep' must, and could, be. With the increase in interest in sleep both within philosophy and more generally in the humanities, Patrick's research offers a mutually delimiting, and thus revealing, analysis of sleep and phenomenology. Patrick also has research interests in: finitude (death, sleep, the unconscious), ethics (continental and moral perfectionism), “post-phenomenological” philosophy (deconstruction, “speculative realism”), and the divide between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. Contact email: p.levy@sussex.ac.uk
Jennifer Lewin (Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Sewanee) has been revising a manuscript entitled Wild Work: Dreams in the English Renaissance, for longer than she dreamed she would. It explores the roles of dreams and sleep in the work of Spenser, Milton, and post-Petrarchan lyric poets in the context of the history of philosophy. She has given invited lectures on the topic at numerous national and local conferences, and related articles and reviews have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, International Shakespeare Yearbook, South Atlantic Review, Renaissance Quarterly, and International Eighteenth-Century Studies. For four years she taught the course Representing Dreams in Literature from Genesis to James Merrill for Boston University's Writing Program.
Bill MacLehose is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science in the department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. He is currently working on a monograph on sleep and medicine in the middle ages, and is the author of A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Columbia University Press, 2007). The new research involves a study of medical and natural philosophical views of sleep and its pathologies, with particular focus on the irrational in sleep and the relation between body and soul in medieval culture. He has recently published several articles on the subject: 'Fear, Fantasy and Sleep in Medieval Medicine' in Emotions and Health, 1200-1700, edited by Elena Carera (Brill, 2013) and 'Sleepwalking, Violence and Desire in the Middle Ages,' Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 37 (2013)
Rob Meadows (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Surrey) found himself working in a sleep lab in 1999. Despite initially feeling a little out of place, he eventually saw how his academic training in sociology and his environment could meet. Since that time, he has published widely on the ways in which couples ‘negotiate’ their sleep and has recently co-authored some of the first chapters to review the ‘sociology of sleep’. Rob is currently trying to understand the role that sleep plays within the marital status/health nexus and is pondering why people monitor their own sleep quality and quantity.
Susan Meriläinen (Professor of Management at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) is in charge of the subproject ‘Sleep in Organizations’ of the multi-disciplinary research project “New Sleep Order” led by professor Anu Valtonen. The subproject focuses on the seemingly still moment of global managers’ lives: sleep. It not only recognizes that managers are beings who spend one third of their life sleeping, but also that the very practice of sleep is problematized and politicized. As a result, ‘good sleep’ – defined by sleep science so as to serve the values of the economy and society – is reconfigured as a moral duty of contemporary managers. Methodologically, the subproject leans on interviewing and 'shadowing' managers to examine what kinds of meanings managers attach to sleep and fatigue in relation to work and to investigate the practices sleep managers adopt to meet the expectations inherent in the discourses of ‘good sleep.’
Jennifer J* Moos is a PhD candidate in American Literary and Cultural Studies. She gained her M.A. in English Philology, Gender Studies, and Linguistics from the University of Freiburg. From 2009-2014, she worked as a lecturer in American Studies at Saarland University. Her PhD project “The Pleasures of Sleeping, or: Reading Sleep in(to) U.S. American Literature” examines the connections between representations of sleep and sleeplessness in U.S. American novels, short fiction, and poems in relation to questions of nation(-building), capitalism, and the human body from Charles Brockden Brown to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. She currently works at the University of Zurich. Contact: jenny.moos[at]googlemail.com
Laura Nissin is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is currently working in Public and Private in the Roman House -project (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/romanhouse) and is finishing her dissertation on the ancient Roman sleeping culture. The main themes of her dissertation are the sleeping areas and the sleeping arrangements in the ancient Roman house (domus). The investigation is carried out on three fronts – the literary sources, the archaeological finds and the architectural outline – in order to identify the sleeping areas in the Roman private dwellings and to trace the sleeping arrangements among Romans on general level; the main interest is to find out the cultural, social and historical factors lying behind the sleeping habits in the ancient society.
After studying Mathematics and Physics, Virgile Novarina has devoted himself to the artistic exploration of his own sleep through writings and drawings, and the sleep of others through photographs and videos. He has published six books of Ecrits et dessins de nuit (Night Writings and Drawings) and has exhibited his work in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the USA. Since 2006, the very act of sleeping has become an integral part of his work, through the En Somme (French language pun, meaning "all in all" or "sleep in progress") series of performances, during which he sleeps publicly in shop windows, galleries or museums.
Virgile Novarina has made two films: Around Sleep (12', 2005) and a documentary film about the French painter Jean Olivier Hucleux (60', 2011). He is currently working on a film entitled Quatre visions du sommeil (Four Visions of Sleep), which gathers four texts by French writers and philosophers: Michel Butor (Matière de rêve, 1975 - 1985), Clément Rosset (Route de nuit, 1999), Pierre Pachet (Nuits étroitement surveillées, 1981) and Jean-Luc Nancy (Tombe de sommeil, 2007).
Website of the film Around Sleep: http://www.autourdusommeil-lefilm.com
Films by Jean Seban about a sleep performance by Virgile Novarina: http://www.jeanseban.fr/JS/Virgile_sleeps.html
Benjamin Parris (PhD in English, Johns Hopkins University) is working on a book manuscript, provisionally titled Workes of Darkenes: Sleep, Insomnia and Early Modern Sensation. It argues that the period's widespread literary fascination with sleep and sleeplessness draws upon and interrogates early modern theories of embodiment and sensation, by linking the challenges of self-governance to nocturnal life. Parris published an essay in Shakespeare Studies (2012) on sovereign sleep and insomnia in William Shakespeare’s tragedies of Hamlet and Macbeth, and his essay on the role of sleep in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is forthcoming from Modern Philology. He is preparing an essay on the connections among sleep, tragedy, and stoic cosmology in Jasper Heywood’s 1561 translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, and has recently begun a new research project on morality and political economy in early English drama. Parris is also Images Curator for Sleep Cultures.
Alexei Penzin is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a member of the artists and intellectuals group Chto Delat/What is to be done?. His major fields of interest are philosophical anthropology, Marxism, post-Soviet studies, and the philosophy of art. Penzin has authored numerous articles and is currently working on a book titled Rex Exsomnis: Towards a Political Economy of Sleep. Click here for a recent talk by Alexei on sleep and "cognitive capitalism".
Outi Rantala (Lecturer in Tourism Studies at the University of Lapland, Multidimensional Tourism Institute, Finland) has worked as a post doctoral researcher in the research project “New Sleep Order” investigating the sleeping of active nature hobbyists; and in the research project “Homes beyond homes” researching rhythms at second homes. Her post doctoral research explores sleep in a context of everyday and leisure rhythms. By applying the rhythmanalysis developed by Henri Lefebvre on nature tourism cases, she aims at finding critical ways to enhance sustainable tourism in the Arctic. She is interested in the topic of sleep because it provides a new perspective to understand the human-nature relationship and especially the role of nature relationship in everyday wellbeing.
Pälvi Rantala (Post Doctoral Researcher in Cultural History, University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) is a newcomer in the area of sleep research. From 2012, she has been working in the “New Sleep Order” project at the University of Lapland, combining cultural historical and sociological knowledge. The focus of her research is on the habits and norms concerning napping in Finland. In particular, she is interested in exploring napping in the context of so called creative work: how do people who have no standardized schedules organize their daily routines, and how is napping part of them? She also is interested in the places and spaces of napping (nowadays and in the past), the soundscape of napping, and mentalities and gender issues involved in napping.
Benjamin Reiss (Professor of English at Emory University; co-director of Emory’s Disability Studies Initiative) is the waking name of a lump of flesh that digests, breathes, hallucinates, and occasionally rolls over at night. In this waking state, he is working on a book about why that condition of lumpishness is such a problem in the modern world – in other words, how sleep has become a state in need of micromanagement, medical attention, and pervasive worry. This interest grew out of his research on his book Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and American Culture (Chicago, 2008), in which he noticed that many patients were admitted to asylums for what today would be diagnosed as sleep disorders. An article published in Common-place, “The Springfield Somnambulist” (Spring 2004), detailed the experiences of one notorious sleepwalker who found herself treated in an asylum. (The piece was recently featured on the American history radio program/podcast Backstory). His essay, “Sleeping at Walden Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body,” in American Literature (March 2013) uses Thoreau’s writings on sleep and waking to explore his understanding of the human body’s relationship to industrial modernity and to changing notions of time. Reiss co-taught a course on Sleep in Science and Culture with neurologist David Rye, and he is affiliated with Emory’s Sleep Center research team.
Maria Ruvoldt (Associate Professor of Art History, Fordham University) began her exploration of sleep and dreams through the study of a drawing by Michelangelo, known as The Dream (c. 1533). She published her findings in “Michelangelo’s Dream,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 86-113. Her book, The Italian Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge, 2004), studies the intersection of sleep, dreams, and conceptions of artistic creativity in Renaissance Italy, in the work of both artists and writers. She is currently working on sleep and dreams as tools for propaganda at the sixteenth-century court of the Medici.
Tarja Salmela (PhD candidate at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) has worked as a researcher in a Tekes-funded project “Vitality through sleep: service design as a strategic tool for enhancing good sleep and associated innovation potential” from September 2012. Her ongoing doctoral thesis, which is situated at the interface of organization and tourism studies, explores the role of sleep in slow tourism and the degrowth movement. It thereby aims at offering an alternative perspective to debates on sustainable and ethical tourism, and societal development. Her recent study (co-authored with Joni Pekkala) focused on sleeping practices enacted in a military training camp of Finnish Defense Forces. Her studies are theoretically informed by theories on practice and methodologically by an ethnographic approach. Currently she is working on a co-authored paper that explores sleeping experiences in the Arctic.
Anna Katharina Schaffner is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Her most recent monograph is Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She has published articles on the history of sexology, psychoanalysis, Dada, the film director David Lynch, and various modern writers. She is currently working on a cultural history of exhaustion. For more on her research on exhaustion, see: http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/towards-a-cultural-history-of-exhaustion/
Lee Scrivner (recently a Fulbright lecturer in the humanities at Bogazici University in Istanbul) has written the forthcoming book Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The book traces numerous etiologies of insomnia's rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century, when it became an object of interest for medical and psychological professionals, social reformers, jurists, novelists, poets--as well as a matter of intense concern for the city-dwelling public at large. The book is multi-disciplinary in nature and, while mainly dealing with the Victorian period, often deigns to comment on our current, twenty-first century milieu with regards to the same problems of sleep in technological modernity. Scrivner's website, which provides a fuller account of his work and research, is at leescrivner.com
Nancy Simpson-Younger is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Visiting Instructor at Luther College. Her dissertation attends to the way that sleeping bodies demand an ethical response from onlookers in English literature of the early modern period (primarily the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras). Her articles on sleeping bodies and their watchers in Sidney's Old Arcadia and Shakespeare's Cymbeline have appeared, respectively, in The Sidney Journal and the collection Staging the Blazon (Ashgate, 2013). She also blogs about sleep and the intersection of the modern and the early modern at nsimpsonyounger.blogspot.com.
Brigitte Steger (Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge) has been researching social and cultural aspects of sleep in Japan since the mid 1990s. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on the topic, including Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West (Routledge 2003), and Worlds of Sleep (Frank & Timme 2008), both co-edited with Lodewijk Brunt. Steger is perhaps best known for describing and theorizing inemuri or napping. Inemuri (literally the sleep while being present in a situation other than sleep) is napping on the train, at a concert or at work, for example. She describes the (mostly tacit) social rules and shows how inemuri can be a meaningful way of harmonizing conflicting social expectations and personal wishes. Her book Inemuri (Rowohlt 2007; in German) was also published in Braille and has recently been translated into Japanese. For more information and a complete list of publications see: http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/general_info/biographies/japanese/Steger.htm and
http://www.research.ames.cam.ac.uk/research-groups/japanese-korean-studies-rg/Japanese-korean-studies-rg-projects/Steger2
Karen Beth Strovas is an assistant professor of English at Wayland Baptist University and associate editor of Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal. Strovas spends most of her research and writing time investigating the causes, consequences, and implications of sleeplessness in the nineteenth-century British novel. She has published or presented on several parts of her dissertation (Sleep and Sleeplessness in the Victorian Novel, Jane Eyre to Dracula, 2011). “‘Oh, my God! am I going to be ill?’: Narratives of Sleep and the Sickbed in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” was published in March 2013 in The CEA Critic [75.1 (March 2013): 22-35]. She is currently focusing on two sleep projects. “Memories of Sleep: Female Testimony in The Blue Gardenia and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” compares the intersection of women’s sleep issues and their memories and testimonies of trauma in two films. Additionally, she is studying the impact of electric light on sleep and the ways in which it shows up in Dracula, in “The Vampire’s Night-Light: Artificial Light, Hypnagogia, and Quality of Sleep in Dracula.”
One of her favorite classes to teach on sleep is a freshman composition course titled “Discovery through Writing: Science, Faith, and Sleep,” in which students read and write on a wide range of topics, including psychological and physiological health, contemporary issues of sleep relevant to college life, sleep in the medical and political professions, sleep in the military, sleep and rest in the Bible, the science of sleep, insomnia, pharmaceutical sleep and waking aids, caffeine, and dreams. She is interested in collaborating on resources and creating interdisciplinary sleep syllabi for writing or literature courses with other sleep scholars.
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Professor of English, Penn State University) came to sleep by way of forgetting. In the final chapter of his book Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge, 2005), Sullivan discusses John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi in light of what 17th-century Protestant moralists term the “spiritual sleep” of those who fail to remember their sins. Working on this chapter, Sullivan became intrigued by the persistent tendency in the Renaissance to denigrate sleep, especially when it came to sleeping “too much” or at “inappropriate” times, as well as the frequent association of sleep with the genre of romance. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge, 2012) contends that this disparagement of sleep was fueled by the challenge sleep poses to human exceptionalism. If reason supposedly differentiates men from plants and animals, sleep blurs distinctions among them in ways that are explored in texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, among others. Sullivan co-curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Renaissance conceptions of sleep and dreams; To Sleep, Perchance to Dream: A Commonplace Book (2009) was published in conjunction with the exhibition. Along with Michael Greaney and Hilary Hinds, he is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website and often blogs about sleep at www.garrettasullivanjr.com.
Anu Valtonen (Professor of Marketing at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) was originally drawn to the topic of sleep through her dissertation, which explored leisure time and consumption. Currently, she leads a multi-disciplinary research project “New Sleep Order” that critically explores sleep from a cultural perspective in the context of tourism, consumer culture and organizations. She is fascinated with the topic of sleep because it provides such a rich phenomenon that surrounds us constantly, but that has remained under-explored, in business studies in particular. Sleep also provides a fruitful platform for posing interesting ethical, political and aesthetical questions, and for challenging existing conceptualizations that structure the way the world is investigated. Theoretically, her studies on sleep are informed by theories of practice, feminist philosophy, and the emerging cultural theory of “new materialism” and associated becoming ontology. Methodologically, she leans on ethnography, and other cultural forms of data, such as narratives and on-line materials. Currently, she is working on several single and co-authored papers that explore, for instance, social aspects of sleep in consumer culture, sleeping experiences in the Arctic, and sleeping in academic and military organizations.
Valtonen, Anu & Soile Veijola (2011). Sleep in Tourism. Annals of Tourism, 38:1, 175-192.
Valtonen, Anu (2011). We Dream as We Live – Consuming. In Research in Consumer Behavior, Vol. 13., eds. Russell W. Belk, Kent Grayson, A. M. Muniz, and H. Jensen Schau, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 93-110.
Valtonen, Anu & Moisander Johanna (2013). “Great Sleep” as a Form of Hedonic Consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 40, 436-441.
Nathaniel Wallace is a professor of English at South Carolina State University. He is among the first American researchers to have made an effort to address, in a comprehensive way, the interrelations of sleep and the arts. His project began with a paper, "Sleep and the Literary Text," at the 1990 conference of the ACLA at Penn State University. Other presentations followed at ACLA, ICLA, MLA, RSA, SAMLA, and SRC conferences; he gave lectures at Cardiff and the University of South Carolina. Wallace taught a course on the representation of sleep at the University of Konstanz (1994-’95) and published articles on the topic in Comparative Literature, Plenum: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Human Conscience, ed. Elrud Ibsch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). His research has included interviewing visual and other artists concerned with sleep’s aesthetic implications. Most recently, Wallace has published Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2016). A companion volume,Resisting Narrative: Representing Sleep in Early Modern Europe, is in progress.
Simon Williams (Professor of Sociology, Warwick). Simon’s interest in sleep matters first developed through his related sociological writings on the body and society. The more he thought about it the more it seemed that the social, cultural, historical, economic, political dimensions and dynamics of sleep merited far greater attention within the social sciences and humanities, including sociology. Sleep after all both shapes and is shaped by society in countless ways. It also as such constitutes a rich and fascinating topic or problem in its own right and a novel prism on wider social, cultural and historical relations. He has therefore, ever since, been actively involved in writing and researching at this sleep, culture and society interface, including contributions on: the ‘social etiquette of sleep’; sleep, embodiment and vulnerability; sleep and human rights; the social construction of sleep in the media and popular culture; the ‘sleep industry’; sleep, enterprise and enhancement in the 24/7 society; and the multiple relations between sleep, health and medicine.
His latest book is on The Politics of Sleep. He is also currently researching the meaning and place of sleep medicines in the management of sleep and wakefulness, and the role of new digital tools and technologies to measure or ‘quantify’ our sleep beyond the sleep lab or clinic in our everyday/night lives. All this in turn has led him to wonder more and more of late about the following matters, which he fully intends to address in years to come: the complex and indeed contested relations between sleep and time; sleep and emotion; sleep and humanity.
To find about more about all this, visit Simon’s website. You may also care to read and reflect further on Simon’s recent discussion in Somatosphere http://somatosphere.net/series/longing-for-sleep with the American anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer entitled ‘Longing for sleep: sleep research in the social sciences and humanities in the twenty-first century’.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz) is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on the biology of everyday life – sleep, eating, defecating, breathing, reproduction, death – and its enrollment in medicine, science and popular culture in the U.S. His book on sleep, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012) focuses on the history of sleep medicine in the U.S. and its contemporary practice, particularly its alignment with transformations in American capitalism. He is currently at work on a book about excrement in American social life, from Kellogg’s cereals to modern fecal transplants. His articles on sleep (and other things) can be found here: http://ucsc.academia.edu/MatthewWolfMeyer.
Carol M. Worthman (Professor of Anthropology, Emory University) aims to reduce the gap in comparative cross-cultural research on sleep and expand the narrow focus of sleep research to include cultural, ecological, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives. She has published a series of papers that map major concepts and patterns in human sleep ecology and behavior. She also has published findings from research in Egypt that document diversity in normative sleep habits, the moral economy of sleep, and its roles as a social behavior. The window of opportunity to document cultures of sleep before the advent of electricity and mass media is rapidly closing, yet our knowledge of sleep and its correlates under these conditions is limited. Worthman's current study in Vietnam is examining sleep beliefs and habits in non-electrified villages before and after the introduction of television. Her publications on sleep include:
Worthman, C. M., & Melby, M. (2002). Toward a comparative developmental ecology of human sleep. In M. A. Carskadon (Ed.), Adolescent sleep patterns: Biological, social, and psychological influences (pp. 69-117). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Worthman, C. M., & Brown, R. A. (2007). Companionable sleep: Social regulation of sleep and co-sleeping in Egyptian families. Journal of Family Psychology, 21, 124-135.
Worthman, C. M. (2008). After dark: The evolutionary ecology of human sleep. In W. R. Trevathan, E. O. Smith & J. J. McKenna (Eds.), Evolutionary medicine and health: New perspectives (pp. 291-313). New York: Oxford University Press.
Worthman, C. M. (2011). Developmental cultural ecology of human sleep. In M. El-Sheikh (Ed.), Sleep and development: Familial and socio-cultural considerations (pp. 167-194). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Worthman, C. M., & Brown, R. A. (2013). Sleep budgets in a globalizing world: Biocultural interactions influence sleep sufficiency among egyptian families. Social Science and Medicine, 79, 31-39.
Joanne Bailey (Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University) is currently working on a history of British manliness from 1750 to 1918. Her publications are on parents: Parenting in England 1760-1830: emotions, identity, and generation (OUP, 2012) and marriage: Unquiet Lives: marriage and marriage breakdown in England 1660-1800 (CUP, 2003). It is her work on family life that has inspired her to carry out research on beds, their uses and meaning in the early modern household. With Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum), she has explored the gendered aspects of activities in and around beds, and the ways in which marital beds symbolised the heart of domestic life. Her more recent work on ideals of manliness has prompted her to think about the ways that sleep was often a marker of manly characteristics in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Too much sleep indicated unmanly over-indulgent behaviour, while restricted sleep was understood to be part of a hard working, manly lifestyle.
Steffan Blayney is a PhD candidate in History at Birkbeck, University of London. His Wellcome Trust-funded project examines fatigue research, and the medicine and politics of work in Britain from 1914 to 1945. He is interested in the development of fatigue as an object of medical research, and in the significances attached to the fatigued working body across a range of discourses. His work looks at the institutional contexts in which medical knowledge of fatigue was produced, and the arenas in which this knowledge was in turn negotiated politically and culturally, from trade union campaigns for holidays with pay to the future worlds imagined by writers of utopian and dystopian fiction. Contact: sblayn01@mail.bbk.ac.uk
Dorothy Bruck (Professor of Psychology, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia) has had a keen interest in sleep research for over three decades and conducted sleep laboratory, questionnaire and interview-based studies around daytime sleepiness disorders, insomnia and arousal thresholds in emergencies. She has recently moved to work within Victoria University's Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing and is working to understand more about sleep in the context of culture and ethnicity. Recently, with doctoral student McLytton Clever, she published a paper comparing sleep quality, sleepiness and sleep beliefs of black Zimbabwean and Ghanaian immigrants with Australian non-immigrants (South African Journal of Psychology). This study was unique in that, unlike other studies of 'minority' groups, there were no SES or mental/physical health differences between the groups and no differences in sleepiness, sleep quality or quantity were found. The finding was consistent with the idea that, where such differences have been found, they have arisen from confounding social and economic factors. The research did find, however, that the immigrant groups were less likely to recognise psychological factors as having a possible role in insomnia. Dorothy is just embarking on a study of the sleep of Sudanese refugees in Australia and is particularly interested in whether cultural differences in sleep behaviours and sleep beliefs have implications for the treatment of insomnia in individuals from non-Western cultures.
Emily Buffey is a PhD candidate in English at The University of Birmingham. Emily's PhD thesis, 'The Early Modern Dream Vision: 1540-1625' is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and investigates the role of the 'Chaucerian' dream vision in English poetry of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, particularly for writers and readers of the 'middle sort'. By focusing on the bedchamber or scholar's study as an important site of textual production, her thesis draws on recent research into the material conditions of literate practice, the physiology of reading, sleep and dreams, and the influence of medieval writers in the Tudor period. Emily's project contributes to current scholarly debates on early modern material culture, the politics of print, historical periodization and the English literary canon. Her research interests also include: sixteenth-century prose fiction, early modern women's writing and the history of reading. Contact: EXB593@bham.ac.uk
Elisha Cohn (Assistant Professor of English, Cornell University) is currently working on a book entitled Still Life: Suspended Agency in the Victorian Novel, which examines representations of reverie, trance and sleep in the nineteenth century. She argues that Victorian novelists significantly shifted their conception of the form and purpose of their art when they began to narrate states of attenuated awareness. Her publications include "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" in Nineteenth Century Literature (2010) and "Still Life: Charlotte Brontë's Suspended Animation" in SEL (2012), which contends that Brontë promotes "sleep-reading"—a non-vigilant experience of encountering art that enables unregulated sensations and unaccustomed affinities—that refuses the purposes of Bildung or self-formation.
Katharine Craik, Reader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, is a Shakespearean by day and a librettist by night. She is Principal Investigator of a project entitled Watching (the Renaissance term for insomnia) funded by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust. At the heart of the project is a new opera for children on the science of sleep that was performed in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, in March 2015. Details of the opera, and the Watching project’s other activities, can be found here: http://www.watching.eca.ed.ac.uk
Alan Derickson (Professor of Labor Studies and History, Penn State) explores working-class semi-consciousness and unconsciousness, especially in its relationship to derangements of working time. Thus far his work has focused on male workers whose overextended wakefulness reflects, in varied ways, unhealthful standards of masculinity. Recent publications include Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and “’No Such Thing as a Night’s Sleep’: The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men from World War II to the Present,” Journal of Social History (2013). Another piece from this project, “’Asleep and Awake at the Same Time’: Sleep Denial among Pullman Porters,” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (2008), won the C. L. R. James Award of the Working Class Studies Association as the best article in the field for 2007-8. Derickson became interested in the fraught relations of sleep and work while observing his wife’s medical internship, a primitive trial designed to produce indefatigable supermen.
A. Roger Ekirch (Professor of History, Virginia Tech) was drawn to the topic of sleep in the course of researching his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (W.W. Norton, 2005), for which he received a Guggenheim fellowship (1998). On discovering that the dominant form of human slumber in Western history was “segmented,” he published “Sleep We Have Lost: Preindustrial Slumber in the British Isles” in the American Historical Review (2001). Besides writing two articles with John Shneerson, M.D. on the history of sleep violence in Sleep Medicine Clinics (2011), Ekirch has spoken widely to medical gatherings on the history of segmented sleep and its implications for our understanding of sleep maintenance insomnia. Most recently, he gave a paper on the modernization of sleep at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies Annual Meeting (2013) in Baltimore, and published 'The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?' in Past and Present (2015). His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s Magazine. Further information may be found at www.history.vt.edu/Ekirch.
Claude Fretz is a PhD candidate at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He gained his BA (hons) in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, and his MA English: Shakespeare in History from University College London (UCL). His PhD project, which is being funded by the University of Birmingham’s College of Arts and Law, examines the link between dreams, sleep, and the genres of comedy, tragedy and late play/romance in Shakespeare’s works. It is informed by a historicist methodology, and thus aims to understand the relationship between Early Modern dream/sleep theories and the playwright’s use and appropriation of dramatic genres. Contact: cxf268@bham.ac.uk
Katie Glaskin (Associate Professor, Anthropology, at the University of Western Australia) first became interested in sleep cross-culturally following her ethnographic explorations of the relationship between dreams, creativity and innovation in Indigenous Australian societies. Her publications include the co-edited book Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); ‘Dreams, memory and the ancestors: creativity, culture and the science of sleep,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1):44-62; and ‘Innovation and ancestral revelation: the case of dreams’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2):297-314.
Michael Greaney (Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster University) is currently working on Sleep and the Novel, a study of the representation of sleep and sleep-related states (such as insomnia, trance and sleepwalking) in fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present day. His publications in the field include ‘Sleep in Modern Fiction’, Literature Compass 7:6 (2010), 467-476; ‘Terribly Strange Beds: Conrad, Sleep, and Modernism’, The Conradian 37: 1 (Spring 2012), 1-19; ‘Sleep and Sleep-watching in Dickens: The Case of Barnaby Rudge’, Studies in the Novel 46:1 (Spring 2014), 1-19; and '"Observed, Measured, Contained": Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep', Contemporary Literature 56: 1(March 2015), 56-80. Along with Hilary Hinds and Garrett Sullivan, he is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website.
Gayle Greene is a professor of English at Scripps College, Claremont, California. Her Ph.D. (Columbia) and first publications were on Shakespeare. She teaches Shakespeare, Creative Nonfiction, Contemporary Women Writers, and an interdisciplinary Humanities course on “The Poetry and Science of Sleep.” She’s published several books on women’s fiction and feminist theory. In the 1990s, her interests turned to health and the environment, and she published The Woman Who Knew Too Much (Michigan, 1999), a biography of pioneer British radiation epidemiologist Alice Stewart.
Insomniac (University of California Press, U.S., Little Brown, U.K, 2008) is a first-person account of living with chronic insomnia that combines memoir with scientific inquiry. Greene interviewed hundreds of people who live with insomnia and dozens of people who deal with the problem professionally — researchers, physicians, psychotherapists — and found a striking disconnect between the “experts’” claims that there are “safe and effective” treatments for insomnia and the howl of pain and rage from insomniacs who have found these treatments to be ineffective, costly, and sometimes dangerous, and feel the problem is trivialized by health professionals. Insomniac was shortlisted for the Gregory Bateson Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthopology: a “Shakespeare scholar turns ethnographer, sleep specialist, and science detective in this funny, moving memoir that reveals just how little the contemporary medical community knows about the world of sleeplessness…” The book was Amazon’s “Spotlight” title, March 2008: “a courageous memoir of chronic insomnia interwoven with a fascinating examination of the emerging biological understanding of sleep disorders. Similar in depth and scope to Andrew Solomon's remarkable memoir of depression, The Noonday Demon, Greene courageously and expertly traverses the scientific, socio-cultural, and personal landscape of a little understood illness.” The New England Journal of Medicine described “the presentation of sleep science” as “very impressive and up to date…at a level I would expect to find in a scientific review… If you want an in-depth overview of the patients, the physicians, and the science that are part of the contemporary culture surrounding insomnia, Greene’s book is the best available on the subject” (Fred Turek, Sept 2009, 359, 13, 1412-13).
Greene’s other publications on sleep include:
“The Case for Sleep Medicine,” “Gray Matter,” New York Times, 3/25/12;
“Death’s Brother: A Theogeny of Sleep” (poem), Canadian Medical Association Journal, Jan 2012;
“Why We Can’t Sleep, It’s Not Just in our Heads, But in our Hormones,” Ms Magazine, April/May 2008
Interviews, publications, and CV at http://www.scrippscollege.edu/academics/faculty/gayle-greene.php
and http://sleepstarved.org/
Sasha Handley (University of Manchester) is currently working on a research project that explores perceptions and practices of sleep in Britain between 1660 and 1760. The project investigates a series of 'relocations': spatial, temporal, medical and cultural. She is interested in tracing how these changes reshaped daily practices of sleep in everyday life. The relocation and rearrangement of sleeping environments are traced through the evidence of probate inventories, whilst changing bedtimes are traced through personal testimonies and in relation to religious beliefs and new leisure pursuits. The project explores how new medical understandings of sleep and sleep disorders were used to frame expressions of subjectivity. Sasha’s sleep-related publications include a series of journal articles that examine the relationship between sleeping habits and religious beliefs, practices of sociability, bed-fellowship, and sleepwalking: ‘From the Sacral to the Moral: Sleeping Practices, Household Worship and Confessional Cultures in Late Seventeenth-Century England’ Cultural and Social History 9:1 (2012), 27-46; ‘Sleepwalking, Subjectivity and the Nervous Body in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:3 (2012), 305-323; ‘Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660-1760, History, 98:329 (2013), 79-104
Sasha is completing a monograph on this subject entitled Bedroom Stories in Early Modern England. Funding from the AHRC, the University of Manchester and McGill University supports the research. In March 2012 Sasha co-convened the interdisciplinary workshop Liminal States of Mind with Dr. Peter Garratt and Dr. Anita O’Connell from which a special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas will emerge in 2014-15. Participants examined a wide range of non-conscious states of mind ranging from somnambulism to waking dreams. Sasha is a member of the interdisciplinary research network Dreams and Dreaming coordinated by Dr. Rachael Wiseman of the University of York. Click here for more details: dreamsanddreaming.wordpress.com
Sasha runs annual guided tours of the sleeping chambers at Ham House in Richmond, home of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ham-house/. The tours are entitled Forty Winks: Sleeping Habits through the Ages and they are free to visitors to the house. This year they take place on Saturday 3 August 2013. More information about the tours and about historical sleeping habits can be found on Sasha’s website, which will be launched shortly: www.historiesofsleep.wordpress.com. Regular updates about the history of sleep are tweeted at: @sashahandley on Twitter.
Cressida J. Heyes is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Alberta, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Cornell University Press 2000) and Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press 2007), and the editor of The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Cornell 2003) and Critical Concepts: Philosophy and Gender (Routledge 2011). She co-edited with Meredith Jones a volume of essays called Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (Ashgate 2009), and the two are now co-authoring a book on feminist approaches to sleep. Cressida is especially interested in sleep as a limit on agency, and attempts to manage sleep as attempts to enforce an understanding of agency as continuous action (rather than as capacity); and in the way representations of white femininity as passive and vulnerable interrelate with representations of sleep. She has just completed an essay that offers a phenomenological analysis of the distinctive harms of the rape of unconscious women.
Hilary Hinds (Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University, UK). She is currently writing a cultural history of twin beds, spanning the period from the late nineteenth century, when twin beds were recommended by domestic sanitarians anxious about disease transmission, through early twentieth-century advice books debating the pros and cons of marital bed-sharing, and ending with twin beds’ demise, as a marital ideal of companionship was superseded by one of ‘togetherness’. The project was supported by a Wellcome Trust fellowship in 2011-12, and will culminate in a monograph. A preliminary article, entitled ‘Together and Apart: Twin Beds, Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage’, was published in 2010 in the Journal of Design History (23.3), 275-304. Along with Michael Greaney and Garrett Sullivan, she is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website.
Sandra Huber is a Swiss-Canadian poet and writer. Her book Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014) is based on a 9-month residency at a sleep laboratory via Swiss Artists in Labs, and goes from the premise that any attempt to "solve" the mystery of sleep requires a radical re-framing of what it means to be conscious. The book includes two foldouts of the writer's neural-oscillations-turned-poetry and is prefaced by an essay on the intersections between sleep science, poetry, and technology (http://talonbooks.com/books/assembling-the-morrow). Sandra currently gives lectures with Pop-Up Lab Switzerland (http://www.popuplab.org/arts/science-of-sleep-poetry) and resides in Berlin.
Sarah Kingston received a Ph.D. in English Literature in May 2015 from the University of Rhode Island for a dissertation entitled “Insomnia and Identity: The Discursive Function of Sleeplessness in Modernist Literature,” which explores the conflicting ways in which British and American literature of the Modernist period becomes a battle ground for the purpose and value of insomnia and regulation of sleep. She has also contributed a chapter entitled “The Work of Sleep: Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon” to the forthcoming book War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's “Parade’s End”, Modernism, and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), eds Ashley Chantler and Robin Hawkes. Her research interests include the relationship between insomnia and the production of identity, as well as the role of insomnia in shaping the literary text. She can be contacted at skingston@newhaven.edu.
Kenton Kroker (Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies at York University [Toronto, Canada]) is the author of The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research (University of Toronto Press, 2007). My interest in the history of sleep began with my doctoral study of rapid eye movement (REM), which asked a deceptively simple question: if REM can be witnessed by the naked eye, why was it not until 1953 that this discovery was formally announced? My subsequent studies of sleep's emergence as an object of scientific knowledge have led to publications on psychological practices and relaxation therapy (“The Progress of Introspection in America, 1896–1938,” Studies in History & Philosophy of Biological & Biomedical Sciences 34C (2003): 77–108) and epidemic neurological diseases (“Epidemic Encephalitis & American Neurology, 1919–40,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 108–47). I am currently working on a paper that accounts for the appearance of sleep deprivation experiments in terms of an emerging Republican ideology in early 20th-century France, as well as on a book-length study of the epidemics of encephalitis lethargica, entitled Epidemics Futures: Epidemic Encephalitis and the Twentieth-century Trade in Emerging Diseases.
Pikka-Maaria Laine (Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Lapland, and Adjunct Professor in Strategic Management, University of Eastern Finland) is currently co-authoring (with Prof. Anu Valtonen and Prof. Susan Meriläinen) a paper that critically examines the epistemological assumptions and knowledge production within the intertwined practices of working and sleeping in academia. She is also interested in the mutual entanglement of working, strategy making, resting and sleeping in knowledge intensive companies of the new economy. Theoretically she draws on post-processual and practice theoretical perspectives, and leans on ethnographic, auto-ethnographic and textual material in her studies.
Patrick Levy is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. The title of his thesis is 'A Phenomenology of Sleep'. It aims to offer a comprehensive response to the challenges raised by sleep for the phenomenological tradition, broadly conceived. In particular, the thesis aims to both identify, gather and delimit the phenomenological resources available to key figures within that tradition (with particular focus on Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas), as well as employing such resources, amongst others, to provide the outlines of what 'a phenomenology of sleep' must, and could, be. With the increase in interest in sleep both within philosophy and more generally in the humanities, Patrick's research offers a mutually delimiting, and thus revealing, analysis of sleep and phenomenology. Patrick also has research interests in: finitude (death, sleep, the unconscious), ethics (continental and moral perfectionism), “post-phenomenological” philosophy (deconstruction, “speculative realism”), and the divide between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. Contact email: p.levy@sussex.ac.uk
Jennifer Lewin (Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Sewanee) has been revising a manuscript entitled Wild Work: Dreams in the English Renaissance, for longer than she dreamed she would. It explores the roles of dreams and sleep in the work of Spenser, Milton, and post-Petrarchan lyric poets in the context of the history of philosophy. She has given invited lectures on the topic at numerous national and local conferences, and related articles and reviews have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, International Shakespeare Yearbook, South Atlantic Review, Renaissance Quarterly, and International Eighteenth-Century Studies. For four years she taught the course Representing Dreams in Literature from Genesis to James Merrill for Boston University's Writing Program.
Bill MacLehose is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science in the department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. He is currently working on a monograph on sleep and medicine in the middle ages, and is the author of A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Columbia University Press, 2007). The new research involves a study of medical and natural philosophical views of sleep and its pathologies, with particular focus on the irrational in sleep and the relation between body and soul in medieval culture. He has recently published several articles on the subject: 'Fear, Fantasy and Sleep in Medieval Medicine' in Emotions and Health, 1200-1700, edited by Elena Carera (Brill, 2013) and 'Sleepwalking, Violence and Desire in the Middle Ages,' Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 37 (2013)
Rob Meadows (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Surrey) found himself working in a sleep lab in 1999. Despite initially feeling a little out of place, he eventually saw how his academic training in sociology and his environment could meet. Since that time, he has published widely on the ways in which couples ‘negotiate’ their sleep and has recently co-authored some of the first chapters to review the ‘sociology of sleep’. Rob is currently trying to understand the role that sleep plays within the marital status/health nexus and is pondering why people monitor their own sleep quality and quantity.
Susan Meriläinen (Professor of Management at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) is in charge of the subproject ‘Sleep in Organizations’ of the multi-disciplinary research project “New Sleep Order” led by professor Anu Valtonen. The subproject focuses on the seemingly still moment of global managers’ lives: sleep. It not only recognizes that managers are beings who spend one third of their life sleeping, but also that the very practice of sleep is problematized and politicized. As a result, ‘good sleep’ – defined by sleep science so as to serve the values of the economy and society – is reconfigured as a moral duty of contemporary managers. Methodologically, the subproject leans on interviewing and 'shadowing' managers to examine what kinds of meanings managers attach to sleep and fatigue in relation to work and to investigate the practices sleep managers adopt to meet the expectations inherent in the discourses of ‘good sleep.’
Jennifer J* Moos is a PhD candidate in American Literary and Cultural Studies. She gained her M.A. in English Philology, Gender Studies, and Linguistics from the University of Freiburg. From 2009-2014, she worked as a lecturer in American Studies at Saarland University. Her PhD project “The Pleasures of Sleeping, or: Reading Sleep in(to) U.S. American Literature” examines the connections between representations of sleep and sleeplessness in U.S. American novels, short fiction, and poems in relation to questions of nation(-building), capitalism, and the human body from Charles Brockden Brown to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. She currently works at the University of Zurich. Contact: jenny.moos[at]googlemail.com
Laura Nissin is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is currently working in Public and Private in the Roman House -project (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/romanhouse) and is finishing her dissertation on the ancient Roman sleeping culture. The main themes of her dissertation are the sleeping areas and the sleeping arrangements in the ancient Roman house (domus). The investigation is carried out on three fronts – the literary sources, the archaeological finds and the architectural outline – in order to identify the sleeping areas in the Roman private dwellings and to trace the sleeping arrangements among Romans on general level; the main interest is to find out the cultural, social and historical factors lying behind the sleeping habits in the ancient society.
After studying Mathematics and Physics, Virgile Novarina has devoted himself to the artistic exploration of his own sleep through writings and drawings, and the sleep of others through photographs and videos. He has published six books of Ecrits et dessins de nuit (Night Writings and Drawings) and has exhibited his work in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the USA. Since 2006, the very act of sleeping has become an integral part of his work, through the En Somme (French language pun, meaning "all in all" or "sleep in progress") series of performances, during which he sleeps publicly in shop windows, galleries or museums.
Virgile Novarina has made two films: Around Sleep (12', 2005) and a documentary film about the French painter Jean Olivier Hucleux (60', 2011). He is currently working on a film entitled Quatre visions du sommeil (Four Visions of Sleep), which gathers four texts by French writers and philosophers: Michel Butor (Matière de rêve, 1975 - 1985), Clément Rosset (Route de nuit, 1999), Pierre Pachet (Nuits étroitement surveillées, 1981) and Jean-Luc Nancy (Tombe de sommeil, 2007).
Website of the film Around Sleep: http://www.autourdusommeil-lefilm.com
Films by Jean Seban about a sleep performance by Virgile Novarina: http://www.jeanseban.fr/JS/Virgile_sleeps.html
Benjamin Parris (PhD in English, Johns Hopkins University) is working on a book manuscript, provisionally titled Workes of Darkenes: Sleep, Insomnia and Early Modern Sensation. It argues that the period's widespread literary fascination with sleep and sleeplessness draws upon and interrogates early modern theories of embodiment and sensation, by linking the challenges of self-governance to nocturnal life. Parris published an essay in Shakespeare Studies (2012) on sovereign sleep and insomnia in William Shakespeare’s tragedies of Hamlet and Macbeth, and his essay on the role of sleep in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is forthcoming from Modern Philology. He is preparing an essay on the connections among sleep, tragedy, and stoic cosmology in Jasper Heywood’s 1561 translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, and has recently begun a new research project on morality and political economy in early English drama. Parris is also Images Curator for Sleep Cultures.
Alexei Penzin is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a member of the artists and intellectuals group Chto Delat/What is to be done?. His major fields of interest are philosophical anthropology, Marxism, post-Soviet studies, and the philosophy of art. Penzin has authored numerous articles and is currently working on a book titled Rex Exsomnis: Towards a Political Economy of Sleep. Click here for a recent talk by Alexei on sleep and "cognitive capitalism".
Outi Rantala (Lecturer in Tourism Studies at the University of Lapland, Multidimensional Tourism Institute, Finland) has worked as a post doctoral researcher in the research project “New Sleep Order” investigating the sleeping of active nature hobbyists; and in the research project “Homes beyond homes” researching rhythms at second homes. Her post doctoral research explores sleep in a context of everyday and leisure rhythms. By applying the rhythmanalysis developed by Henri Lefebvre on nature tourism cases, she aims at finding critical ways to enhance sustainable tourism in the Arctic. She is interested in the topic of sleep because it provides a new perspective to understand the human-nature relationship and especially the role of nature relationship in everyday wellbeing.
Pälvi Rantala (Post Doctoral Researcher in Cultural History, University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) is a newcomer in the area of sleep research. From 2012, she has been working in the “New Sleep Order” project at the University of Lapland, combining cultural historical and sociological knowledge. The focus of her research is on the habits and norms concerning napping in Finland. In particular, she is interested in exploring napping in the context of so called creative work: how do people who have no standardized schedules organize their daily routines, and how is napping part of them? She also is interested in the places and spaces of napping (nowadays and in the past), the soundscape of napping, and mentalities and gender issues involved in napping.
Benjamin Reiss (Professor of English at Emory University; co-director of Emory’s Disability Studies Initiative) is the waking name of a lump of flesh that digests, breathes, hallucinates, and occasionally rolls over at night. In this waking state, he is working on a book about why that condition of lumpishness is such a problem in the modern world – in other words, how sleep has become a state in need of micromanagement, medical attention, and pervasive worry. This interest grew out of his research on his book Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and American Culture (Chicago, 2008), in which he noticed that many patients were admitted to asylums for what today would be diagnosed as sleep disorders. An article published in Common-place, “The Springfield Somnambulist” (Spring 2004), detailed the experiences of one notorious sleepwalker who found herself treated in an asylum. (The piece was recently featured on the American history radio program/podcast Backstory). His essay, “Sleeping at Walden Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body,” in American Literature (March 2013) uses Thoreau’s writings on sleep and waking to explore his understanding of the human body’s relationship to industrial modernity and to changing notions of time. Reiss co-taught a course on Sleep in Science and Culture with neurologist David Rye, and he is affiliated with Emory’s Sleep Center research team.
Maria Ruvoldt (Associate Professor of Art History, Fordham University) began her exploration of sleep and dreams through the study of a drawing by Michelangelo, known as The Dream (c. 1533). She published her findings in “Michelangelo’s Dream,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 86-113. Her book, The Italian Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge, 2004), studies the intersection of sleep, dreams, and conceptions of artistic creativity in Renaissance Italy, in the work of both artists and writers. She is currently working on sleep and dreams as tools for propaganda at the sixteenth-century court of the Medici.
Tarja Salmela (PhD candidate at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) has worked as a researcher in a Tekes-funded project “Vitality through sleep: service design as a strategic tool for enhancing good sleep and associated innovation potential” from September 2012. Her ongoing doctoral thesis, which is situated at the interface of organization and tourism studies, explores the role of sleep in slow tourism and the degrowth movement. It thereby aims at offering an alternative perspective to debates on sustainable and ethical tourism, and societal development. Her recent study (co-authored with Joni Pekkala) focused on sleeping practices enacted in a military training camp of Finnish Defense Forces. Her studies are theoretically informed by theories on practice and methodologically by an ethnographic approach. Currently she is working on a co-authored paper that explores sleeping experiences in the Arctic.
Anna Katharina Schaffner is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Her most recent monograph is Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She has published articles on the history of sexology, psychoanalysis, Dada, the film director David Lynch, and various modern writers. She is currently working on a cultural history of exhaustion. For more on her research on exhaustion, see: http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/towards-a-cultural-history-of-exhaustion/
Lee Scrivner (recently a Fulbright lecturer in the humanities at Bogazici University in Istanbul) has written the forthcoming book Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The book traces numerous etiologies of insomnia's rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century, when it became an object of interest for medical and psychological professionals, social reformers, jurists, novelists, poets--as well as a matter of intense concern for the city-dwelling public at large. The book is multi-disciplinary in nature and, while mainly dealing with the Victorian period, often deigns to comment on our current, twenty-first century milieu with regards to the same problems of sleep in technological modernity. Scrivner's website, which provides a fuller account of his work and research, is at leescrivner.com
Nancy Simpson-Younger is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Visiting Instructor at Luther College. Her dissertation attends to the way that sleeping bodies demand an ethical response from onlookers in English literature of the early modern period (primarily the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras). Her articles on sleeping bodies and their watchers in Sidney's Old Arcadia and Shakespeare's Cymbeline have appeared, respectively, in The Sidney Journal and the collection Staging the Blazon (Ashgate, 2013). She also blogs about sleep and the intersection of the modern and the early modern at nsimpsonyounger.blogspot.com.
Brigitte Steger (Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge) has been researching social and cultural aspects of sleep in Japan since the mid 1990s. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on the topic, including Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West (Routledge 2003), and Worlds of Sleep (Frank & Timme 2008), both co-edited with Lodewijk Brunt. Steger is perhaps best known for describing and theorizing inemuri or napping. Inemuri (literally the sleep while being present in a situation other than sleep) is napping on the train, at a concert or at work, for example. She describes the (mostly tacit) social rules and shows how inemuri can be a meaningful way of harmonizing conflicting social expectations and personal wishes. Her book Inemuri (Rowohlt 2007; in German) was also published in Braille and has recently been translated into Japanese. For more information and a complete list of publications see: http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/general_info/biographies/japanese/Steger.htm and
http://www.research.ames.cam.ac.uk/research-groups/japanese-korean-studies-rg/Japanese-korean-studies-rg-projects/Steger2
Karen Beth Strovas is an assistant professor of English at Wayland Baptist University and associate editor of Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal. Strovas spends most of her research and writing time investigating the causes, consequences, and implications of sleeplessness in the nineteenth-century British novel. She has published or presented on several parts of her dissertation (Sleep and Sleeplessness in the Victorian Novel, Jane Eyre to Dracula, 2011). “‘Oh, my God! am I going to be ill?’: Narratives of Sleep and the Sickbed in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” was published in March 2013 in The CEA Critic [75.1 (March 2013): 22-35]. She is currently focusing on two sleep projects. “Memories of Sleep: Female Testimony in The Blue Gardenia and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” compares the intersection of women’s sleep issues and their memories and testimonies of trauma in two films. Additionally, she is studying the impact of electric light on sleep and the ways in which it shows up in Dracula, in “The Vampire’s Night-Light: Artificial Light, Hypnagogia, and Quality of Sleep in Dracula.”
One of her favorite classes to teach on sleep is a freshman composition course titled “Discovery through Writing: Science, Faith, and Sleep,” in which students read and write on a wide range of topics, including psychological and physiological health, contemporary issues of sleep relevant to college life, sleep in the medical and political professions, sleep in the military, sleep and rest in the Bible, the science of sleep, insomnia, pharmaceutical sleep and waking aids, caffeine, and dreams. She is interested in collaborating on resources and creating interdisciplinary sleep syllabi for writing or literature courses with other sleep scholars.
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Professor of English, Penn State University) came to sleep by way of forgetting. In the final chapter of his book Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge, 2005), Sullivan discusses John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi in light of what 17th-century Protestant moralists term the “spiritual sleep” of those who fail to remember their sins. Working on this chapter, Sullivan became intrigued by the persistent tendency in the Renaissance to denigrate sleep, especially when it came to sleeping “too much” or at “inappropriate” times, as well as the frequent association of sleep with the genre of romance. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge, 2012) contends that this disparagement of sleep was fueled by the challenge sleep poses to human exceptionalism. If reason supposedly differentiates men from plants and animals, sleep blurs distinctions among them in ways that are explored in texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, among others. Sullivan co-curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Renaissance conceptions of sleep and dreams; To Sleep, Perchance to Dream: A Commonplace Book (2009) was published in conjunction with the exhibition. Along with Michael Greaney and Hilary Hinds, he is one of the founders of the Sleep Cultures website and often blogs about sleep at www.garrettasullivanjr.com.
Anu Valtonen (Professor of Marketing at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland) was originally drawn to the topic of sleep through her dissertation, which explored leisure time and consumption. Currently, she leads a multi-disciplinary research project “New Sleep Order” that critically explores sleep from a cultural perspective in the context of tourism, consumer culture and organizations. She is fascinated with the topic of sleep because it provides such a rich phenomenon that surrounds us constantly, but that has remained under-explored, in business studies in particular. Sleep also provides a fruitful platform for posing interesting ethical, political and aesthetical questions, and for challenging existing conceptualizations that structure the way the world is investigated. Theoretically, her studies on sleep are informed by theories of practice, feminist philosophy, and the emerging cultural theory of “new materialism” and associated becoming ontology. Methodologically, she leans on ethnography, and other cultural forms of data, such as narratives and on-line materials. Currently, she is working on several single and co-authored papers that explore, for instance, social aspects of sleep in consumer culture, sleeping experiences in the Arctic, and sleeping in academic and military organizations.
Valtonen, Anu & Soile Veijola (2011). Sleep in Tourism. Annals of Tourism, 38:1, 175-192.
Valtonen, Anu (2011). We Dream as We Live – Consuming. In Research in Consumer Behavior, Vol. 13., eds. Russell W. Belk, Kent Grayson, A. M. Muniz, and H. Jensen Schau, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 93-110.
Valtonen, Anu & Moisander Johanna (2013). “Great Sleep” as a Form of Hedonic Consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 40, 436-441.
Nathaniel Wallace is a professor of English at South Carolina State University. He is among the first American researchers to have made an effort to address, in a comprehensive way, the interrelations of sleep and the arts. His project began with a paper, "Sleep and the Literary Text," at the 1990 conference of the ACLA at Penn State University. Other presentations followed at ACLA, ICLA, MLA, RSA, SAMLA, and SRC conferences; he gave lectures at Cardiff and the University of South Carolina. Wallace taught a course on the representation of sleep at the University of Konstanz (1994-’95) and published articles on the topic in Comparative Literature, Plenum: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Human Conscience, ed. Elrud Ibsch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). His research has included interviewing visual and other artists concerned with sleep’s aesthetic implications. Most recently, Wallace has published Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2016). A companion volume,Resisting Narrative: Representing Sleep in Early Modern Europe, is in progress.
Simon Williams (Professor of Sociology, Warwick). Simon’s interest in sleep matters first developed through his related sociological writings on the body and society. The more he thought about it the more it seemed that the social, cultural, historical, economic, political dimensions and dynamics of sleep merited far greater attention within the social sciences and humanities, including sociology. Sleep after all both shapes and is shaped by society in countless ways. It also as such constitutes a rich and fascinating topic or problem in its own right and a novel prism on wider social, cultural and historical relations. He has therefore, ever since, been actively involved in writing and researching at this sleep, culture and society interface, including contributions on: the ‘social etiquette of sleep’; sleep, embodiment and vulnerability; sleep and human rights; the social construction of sleep in the media and popular culture; the ‘sleep industry’; sleep, enterprise and enhancement in the 24/7 society; and the multiple relations between sleep, health and medicine.
His latest book is on The Politics of Sleep. He is also currently researching the meaning and place of sleep medicines in the management of sleep and wakefulness, and the role of new digital tools and technologies to measure or ‘quantify’ our sleep beyond the sleep lab or clinic in our everyday/night lives. All this in turn has led him to wonder more and more of late about the following matters, which he fully intends to address in years to come: the complex and indeed contested relations between sleep and time; sleep and emotion; sleep and humanity.
To find about more about all this, visit Simon’s website. You may also care to read and reflect further on Simon’s recent discussion in Somatosphere http://somatosphere.net/series/longing-for-sleep with the American anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer entitled ‘Longing for sleep: sleep research in the social sciences and humanities in the twenty-first century’.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz) is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on the biology of everyday life – sleep, eating, defecating, breathing, reproduction, death – and its enrollment in medicine, science and popular culture in the U.S. His book on sleep, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012) focuses on the history of sleep medicine in the U.S. and its contemporary practice, particularly its alignment with transformations in American capitalism. He is currently at work on a book about excrement in American social life, from Kellogg’s cereals to modern fecal transplants. His articles on sleep (and other things) can be found here: http://ucsc.academia.edu/MatthewWolfMeyer.
Carol M. Worthman (Professor of Anthropology, Emory University) aims to reduce the gap in comparative cross-cultural research on sleep and expand the narrow focus of sleep research to include cultural, ecological, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives. She has published a series of papers that map major concepts and patterns in human sleep ecology and behavior. She also has published findings from research in Egypt that document diversity in normative sleep habits, the moral economy of sleep, and its roles as a social behavior. The window of opportunity to document cultures of sleep before the advent of electricity and mass media is rapidly closing, yet our knowledge of sleep and its correlates under these conditions is limited. Worthman's current study in Vietnam is examining sleep beliefs and habits in non-electrified villages before and after the introduction of television. Her publications on sleep include:
Worthman, C. M., & Melby, M. (2002). Toward a comparative developmental ecology of human sleep. In M. A. Carskadon (Ed.), Adolescent sleep patterns: Biological, social, and psychological influences (pp. 69-117). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Worthman, C. M., & Brown, R. A. (2007). Companionable sleep: Social regulation of sleep and co-sleeping in Egyptian families. Journal of Family Psychology, 21, 124-135.
Worthman, C. M. (2008). After dark: The evolutionary ecology of human sleep. In W. R. Trevathan, E. O. Smith & J. J. McKenna (Eds.), Evolutionary medicine and health: New perspectives (pp. 291-313). New York: Oxford University Press.
Worthman, C. M. (2011). Developmental cultural ecology of human sleep. In M. El-Sheikh (Ed.), Sleep and development: Familial and socio-cultural considerations (pp. 167-194). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Worthman, C. M., & Brown, R. A. (2013). Sleep budgets in a globalizing world: Biocultural interactions influence sleep sufficiency among egyptian families. Social Science and Medicine, 79, 31-39.
