Events

Jointly organized by Department of English Language and Literature, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Anne M. Thell, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

We seem obsessed by the quality of our sleep in the early twenty-first century, yet the high point of sleep research was the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly the period from 1880-1900, when modern sleep studies began. For the Victorians, sleep was an active state which enabled or disabled certain functions of mind and body. How one slept was therefore of considerable interest to the general public as well as to physiologists, physicians and neurologists. Concurrent with this avid attention to the epistemologies of sleep, utopian fictions employed sleep as a foundation for asking questions of ideal lives and worlds. Often, other worlds were entered through the medium of sleep. This seminar will consider the connections between sleep and utopia and ask whether sleep is itself a good place. It will do so, additionally, through an experimental methodology combining historical research with a participant ethnography in a contemporary sleep laboratory. The aim is to see how far historical sleep analysis offers us insight into contemporary sleep science and our wider understandings of sleep today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Martin Willis is Professor of English at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. He is a prominent scholar of literature and science, who has written eight books and numerous articles on nineteenth century science, medicine and literature as well as on the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in the contemporary academy. His 2011 monograph Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920, published in Bernard Lightman’s Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Series with Pickering and Chatto won both the BSLS Book Prize and the ESSE Cultural Studies Book Prize. He is the founding editor of Journal of Literature and Science, a former President of the British Society for Literature and Science (2015-18), and the current British Ambassador to the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Europe. In 2016 he founded the Cardiff ScienceHumanities Initiative, which is dedicated to rethinking the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. He is in Singapore en route to take up a Visiting Fellowship at Australia National University in Canberra.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.