Tuesday, September 12, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

"Wild Nights:  How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World"

In 2015, Benjamin Reiss, who specializes in 19th-century American literature, disability studies, and health humanities, won a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on Wild Nights, the book he’ll be discussing with us today.  As he’ll explain, sleep is a biological necessity for all living creatures, yet among humans it is practiced in an astonishing variety of ways.  Contemporary Western society has developed a rigid set of rules for sleeping: seven to eight hours in one straight shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, at most two consenting adults sharing a bed, children apart from parents (and each other), everyone on a rigid schedule that is more or less invariant across the seasons.  For most of human history, practically no one slept in this way, yet today failure to sleep according to the rules is a sign of either a medical disorder or a social failure.  Ben’s talk will uncover some of the historical causes and economic, psychological, racial, and environmental consequences of our peculiar manner of sleeping.