Just Announced: Awarded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship

I am delighted to have been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship through the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) program in collaboration with the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Humanities. My project is titled Polar Night/Midnight Sun (PNMS): A history of sleep and time in the Arctic, 1800-1900. Building on my current research into the histories of circadian rhythms and their disruption, this project moves to the Arctic as a place understood by European explorers, scientists, and traders as ‘timeless’. PNMS mobilizes the case of Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century as a lens through which to consider the development of the ‘modern’ European body – through disciplinary practices of sleeping, eating, and time management. This interdisciplinary project will bring together the histories of health and medicine, temporality studies, Polar history and the environmental humanities to re-centre rhythms in the encounter of bodies in the 19th century Arctic landscape. This project is a collaboration between myself and Dr Hugo Reinert and Professor Brita Brenna at the University of Oslo. It will also involve some collaborative research outreach work with the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. PNMS begins in autumn 2023 - so watch this space! See below for a longer introduction to the project.

‘The Dream, Midnight, the Middle Watch’ from the Illustrated Arctic News, October 31, 1850.’

Do you remember waking up this morning? Despite its importance in our lives, sleep is often overlooked and undervalued. An analysis of patterns of sleeping can offer a unique insight into the lived experiences of past peoples while revealing the cultural norms and values which crystallize around these bodily practices. My research will demonstrate how experiences of sleep and attitudes towards time management are culturally and temporally contingent and provide a context for contemporary anxieties around sleep in our 24/7 society.

‘This travelling by night and sleeping by day so completely inverted the natural order of things, that it was difficult to persuade ourselves of the reality. Even the officers and myself, who were furnished with pocket chronometers, could not always bear in mind what part in the twenty-four hours we had arrived.’1 – William E. Perry, 1828

European explorers visiting the Arctic Circle in the nineteenth century were confronted with the logistical and psychological challenges of the Polar Night and the Midnight Sun. In bodies acclimatized to more equal light-dark cycles, the long winter nights and the endless summer days characteristic of far northern latitudes resulted in disrupted circadian rhythms of sleeping and eating in their bodies. As European conceptions of time and time coordination crystallized across the nineteenth century, the published and unpublished accounts of these visitors to the Arctic influenced popular imaginings of this landscape as beautiful, timeless and dangerous: a space which inverted the ‘natural order of things’ and tested the physical and psychological limits of the Europeans who ventured there. PNMS examines sleep and time in the Arctic during the nineteenth century. In this action, I will explore how the insights of circadian rhythm science can shed new light on the experience of sleep and embodied time for members of nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions.