Readings and Resources

I am often asked for suggestions for readings on the history of sleep and circadian rhythms - so I thought I would start to compile a reading list. This will be a mix of academic and more popular writings, as well as resources for things like shift work and sleep disorders. This is not an exhaustive list and the scholarship is growing all the time!

If you want to read more about my own research work on sleep history (and other things) you can click the button below.

Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman (2005) in ‘The day within and the day without,’ Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing pp. 10-21.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer (2013), ‘Where have all our naps gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the Consolidation of Sleep, and the Historiography of Emergence,’ Anthropology of Consciousness 24(2): 96–116. 

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Shackelford: Jole Shackelford (2022) ‘Human Rhythms, Desychronization, and Disease,’ in Introduction to the History of Chronobiology Volume 2. University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 189-225.

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Natasha Feiner (2020) ‘Pilot fatigue and the regulation of airline schedules in post-war Britain.’ In: Jackson M, Moore MD, editors. Balancing the self: Medicine, politics and the regulation of health in the twentieth century. Manchester University Press. Chapter 7.

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Josephine Arendt, Barbara Stone and Debra Skene (2005) ‘Sleep disruption in jet lag and other circadian rhythm-related disorders,’ in Practices and Principles of Sleep Medicine, 4th edition, pp. 659-672.

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Tom Crook (2008) ‘Norms, Forms and beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain,’ Body & Society 14(4): 15–35.

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Sasha Handley (2013) ‘Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660-1760.’ History 98(1): 79– 104.

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Holly Fletcher (2024) ‘Making beds in early modern England: sleep, matter and environmental change,’ Historical Research, Volume 97, Issue 277: 307–328,

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Anthony S. Wohl (1978) ‘Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Classes,’ in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (London: Croom Helm).

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Vicky Holmes (2014) ‘Death of an Infant: Coroners’ Inquests and the Study of Victorian Domestic Practice’, Home cultures, 11(3), pp. 305–331.

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Vicky Holmes (2014) ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town.’ Journal of Victorian Culture 19(3): 314–331.

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Matthew Wolf-Meyer (2013) ‘The Rise of American Sleep Medicine: Diagnosing and Misdiagnosing Sleep,’ in The Slumbering Masses, pp. 27–50.

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Kenton Kroker (2007) ‘Sleep Finds a Groove,’ The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research. University of Toronto Press, pp. 255–324.

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Hannah Ahlheim (2013) ‘Governing the World of Wakefulness: The Exploration of Alertness, Performance and Brain Activity with the Help of ‘Stay-Wake-Men,’ Anthropology of Consciousness 24 (2): 117-136.

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Lukasz Kamienski (2016) ‘Drugs in the Contemporary American Armed Forces,’ in Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War. Oxford University Press. pp. 263-284.

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Vastag B. (2004) Poised to Challenge Need for Sleep, "Wakefulness Enhancer" Rouses Concerns. JAMA. 2004;291(2):167–170. doi:10.1001/jama.291.2.167

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Peretz Lavie (2008) ‘Who was the first to use the term Pickwickian in connection with sleepy patients? History of sleep apnoea syndrome,’ Sleep Medicine Reviews 12: 5–17.

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Steffan Blayney (2019) ‘Industrial Fatigue and the Productive Body: The Science of Work in Britain, 1900-1918,’ Social History of Medicine 32(2): 310–328.

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K. D. Hussey (2021) ‘The Waste of Daylight’: Rhythmicity, Workers’ Health and Britain’s Edwardian Daylight Saving Time Bills. Social History of Medicine 35(2): 422–443.

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Alan Derickson (2013) ‘The Long Turn: Steelworkers and Shift Rotation,’ in Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 53– 83.

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Hannah Ahlheim (2022) ‘Expanding the Limits. Toward a history of working and waking in modern societies,’ in Working at Night: The Temporal Organisation of Labour Across Political and Economic Regimes, De Gruyter. Pp. 255–270.

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Anna Crozier (2009) ‘What Was Tropical about Tropical Neurasthenia? The Utility of the Diagnosis in the Management of British East Africa,’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64(4): 518–548.

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Birgitte Stegers (2003) ‘Negotiating sleep patterns in Japan’ in Night-Time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, pp. 65–86.

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Giordano Nanni (2011) ‘Time, empire and resistance in settler-colonial Victoria,’ Time & Society, 20(1): 5–33.

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Arun Kumar (2022) ‘The Nights of Bombay Workers (1870-1920)’ in Working at Night: The Temporal Organisation of Labour Across Political and Economic Regimes, eds. Ger Duijzings and Lucie Duskova, De Gruyer, pp. 45-68.

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Vanessa Ogle (2015) ‘A battle of colonial times’ in The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950. Harvard University Press. Pp. 99-119.

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Ritam Sengupta (2022) ‘Keeping the master cool, everyday, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India,’ The Indian Economic and Social Review 59(1): 37–73.

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A. R. Ekirch (2001) ‘Sleep we have lost: Pre-industrial slumber in the British Isles,’ The American Historical Review 106(2), pp. 343–386.

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A.R. Ekirch (2015) ‘The Modernization of Western Sleep: or, Does insomnia have a history?’ Past and Present 226: 149–192.

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Matthew Wolf-Meyer (2016) ‘Can we ever know the sleep of our ancestors?’ Sleep Health 2, Pp. 4–5.

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Gerrit Verhoeven (2021) ‘Groping in the dark: A response to Roger Ekirch.’ Journal of Sleep Research 30, Pp. 1–3.

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A. Roger Ekirch (2005) Day at Night’s Close: Night in Times Past. W. W. Norton and Co.

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Sasha Handley (2016) Sleep in Early Modern England. Yale University Press.

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Kenton Kroker (2022), ‘Insomnia, Medicalization and Expert Knowledge,’ Canadian Journal of Health History 39(1): 37-71.

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Melissa Dickson (2020) ‘Dicken’s nightmare: dreams, memory and trauma,’ Interface Focus

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Beatrice Laurent (2014) ‘The Strange Case of the Victorian Sleeping Maid,’ in Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth, pp. 27- 51.

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Stephen Thompson (2015) ‘Ancillary narratives: maids, sleepwalking, and agency in nineteenth century literature and culture,’ Textual Practice 29(1): 91-110.

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Jennifer Wallis (2019) ‘Bringing them up to Speed’: Nineteenth-century nervous systems and cultural fantasies of adaptation,’ in Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pp. 181–216.

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K. D. Hussey (2021) ‘Visceral Consciousness: The Gut-Brain Axis in Sleep and Sleeplessness in Britain and America, 1850–1914’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 95: 350–378.

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Sally Shuttleworth (2019) ‘Stress Caused Sleeplessness for the Victorians,’ The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/stress-caused-sleeplessness-for-the-victorians-too-but-they-thought-it-only-afflicted-brain-workers-123247

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Kenton Kroker, ‘Analogize and Experiment,’ in The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research. University of Toronto Press. Pp. 71–120.

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Bonnie Blustein (1986) ‘The Brief Career of ‘Cerebral Hyperaemia’: William A. Hammond and his insomniac patients, 1854-90,’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41(1), 24–51.

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Giordano Nanni (2012) ‘Clocks, Sabbaths and seven-day weeks: The forging of European temporal identities,’ in The colonisation of time: Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire. University of Manchester Press. Pp. 25– 58.

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Voth, Hans-Joachim. “Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London.” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 1 (1998): 29–58. 

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Sasha Handley (2018) 'Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet,' History Workshop Journal, Volume 85, Pages 169–194.

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Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, 'Clocks, Clock Time and Time Consciousness in the Visual Arts: William Hogarth’s Modern Moral Subject,' in Bernasconi, Gianenrico and Thürigen, Susanne. Material Histories of Time: Objects and Practices, 14th-19th Centuries, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. pp. 71-88. 

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Matthew Wolf-Meyer. ‘The Protestant Origins of American Sleep,’ in The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life. University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 51–78.

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E. P. Thompson (1967), ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’ Past and Present 38: 56–97.

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Elizabeth Hunter (2020) ‘That venerable and princely custom of long-lying abed’: Sleep and civility in seventeenth and eighteenth century urban society,’ in Lifestyle and Medicine in the Enlightenment, eds. James Kennaway and Rina Knoeff. Routledge, pp. 163 – 183.

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Benjamin Reiss (2017) ‘Before Sleep was Normal’ in Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created our Restless World. Basic Books. Pp. 23–55.

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Brigitte Steger and Lodewijk Brunt (2003) ‘Introduction: into the night and the world of sleep’ in Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the dark side of life. Routledge. Pp. 1–23.

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Marcel Mauss (1973) ‘Techniques of the Body’ Economy and Society, pp. 70–88.

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Matthew Walker (2017) ‘Defining and Generating Sleep’ in Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner. Pp. 37–53.

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Hannah Ahlheim, Darius Zifonun and Nicole Zillien (2023) ‘Sleep, Knowledge, Technology. An Introduction,’ in Historical Social Research 48(2): 7-22.

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Williams SJ, Meadows R, Coveney CM (2021) ‘Desynchronised times? Chronobiology, (bio)medicalisation and the rhythms of life itself.’ Sociology of Health and Illness 43(6):1501-1517.

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Matthew Wolf- Meyer ‘Conclusion: The Futures of Sleep’ in The Slumbering Masses, pp.243–261.

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Ben Lyall and Bjørn Nansen (2023) ‘Redefining Rest: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Digital Sleep Technologies,’ Historical Social Research 48 (2): 135–156.