Histories of Sleep explores the latest research into sleeping habits throughout the ages. Sleeping hours, sleeping environments, sleeping postures and bedtime routines have been heavily shaped by different socio-cultural forces in a wide variety of historical contexts. Histories of Sleep invites contributions from those pursuing research into these themes and from those with a more general interest in historical sleeping practices.

Dr Sasha Handley is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sasha’s research explores ideas, practices, environments and objects relating to sleep in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English society and the ways in which they shaped sleep-quality. Funding for this research has been provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy.

Sasha’s sleep-related publications include the forthcoming book Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), ISBN: 9780300220391. Relevant journal articles include:

• “Deformities of nature: sleepwalking and non-conscious states of mind in late eighteenth-century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming, 2016).
• “Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660-1760,” History: the Journal of the Historical Association, 98:329 (2013): 79-104.
• “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.

For more information about Sasha’s work visit: Research Profile