Benjamin ReissNobel Conference 60

Benjamin Reiss

Professor of English at Emory University 

The history of sleep

Sleep is at the core of the human experience, from our basic biology to the social organization of our waking lives. It is something we have always done, yet the history and variety of the experience of sleep has rarely been the subject of public discussion or scholarly investigation. The emerging field of critical sleep studies, to which Benjamin Reiss is a major contributor, explores this hidden history. It also considers sleep as a point of relationship between the lives of individuals and social phenomena such as war, societal conflict, and technological innovation –phenomena that do command public attention, and to which sleep is profoundly vulnerable. 

 An anchoring insight of critical sleep studies is that modern society is defined, in part, by its desire to control sleep, both by limiting the hours approved for it and by isolating sleepers. Many of us currently living on the planet take it for granted that we will spend some part of each day (roughly eight hours) separated off in a room designated for the exclusive purpose of sleeping. Reiss’s work begins from the observation that humans didn’t always sleep (or fail to sleep) that way. His book, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World (2017) explores how our encounter with the fragility of sleep can equip us for a greater awareness of our common humanity. The book was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

 What are the costs and consequences of modern society’s norms for sleeping? For many, sleep is frustrating. It takes emotional energy – and sometimes money – to build the necessary discipline to manage sleep in our demanding lives. A parent manages their own loss of sleep while striving to instill sleep disciplines in their children. Social factors compound the challenges of sleep. Individuals who are racially minoritized, for example, are statistically likely to experience more diminished sleep–with its accompanying negative health outcomes–than non-Hispanic whites. 

Reiss specializes in American cultural history. Alongside sleep, he studies health, race, disability, and conceptions of madness and freakishness. He focuses on socially marginalized experiences, including those of the enslaved, the disabled, the elderly, the insane, and those whose divergent characteristics have been put on public display. His first book, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (2001) explored the experience of an elderly, disabled, and enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom P. T. Barnum put on tour in the 1830s, billing her as the oldest living human. A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research fellowship on the cultural history of American insane asylums that paid particular attention to the creative lives of the patients led to his next book Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2008).

The intersections of the individual’s social experience of health, society and sleep play out in Reiss’s many academic undertakings, such as his current roles on the board of the journal Sleep Health and as an editor of a forthcoming cultural history of sleep in the modern era. He is also involved in the cause of public humanities, in particular engaging with cultural institutions such as local theaters and community advocacy non-profit organizations. 

Benjamin Reiss is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Emory University.