Arthur Roger Ekirch (born February 6, 1950) is University Distinguished Professor of history at
Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...
in the United States. He was a
Guggenheim fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 1998.
The son of intellectual historian Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. and Dorothy Gustafson, Roger Ekirch is internationally known for his pioneering research into pre-industrial sleeping patterns that was first published in "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles" and later in his award-winning 2005 book ''At Day's Close: Night in Times Past''.
Selected publications
Books
* ''"Poor Carolina": Politics and society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776'', University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
* ''Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775'', Oxford University Press, 1987.
* ''At Day's Close: Night in Times Past'', W.W. Norton, 2005.
* ''Birthright: The True Story of the Kidnapping of
Jemmy Annesley'', W.W. Norton, 2010.
* ''American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution'', Pantheon, 2017.
* ''La Grande Transformation du Sommeil: Comment la Revolution Indsustrielle a Boulverse Nos Nuits'', Editions Amersterdam, 2021.
Articles
* "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles", ''
The American Historical Review
''The American Historical Review'' is a quarterly academic history journal and the official publication of the American Historical Association. It targets readers interested in all periods and facets of history and has often been described as the ...
'', 2001.
* "The Modernization of Western Slumber: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?", ''
Past & Present'', 2015.
* "Segmented Sleep in Preindustrial Societies", ''
Sleep
Sleep is a sedentary state of mind and body. It is characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited Perception, sensory activity, reduced muscle activity and reduced interactions with surroundings. It is distinguished from wakefuln ...
'', 2016.
* "What Sleep Research Can Learn From History", ''
Sleep Health'', 2018.
See also
*
Biphasic and polyphasic sleep
Biphasic sleep (or ''diphasic'', ''bifurcated'', or bimodal sleep) is the practice of sleeping during two periods over the course of 24 hours, while polyphasic sleep refers to sleeping multiple times—usually more than two. Each of these is in ...
References
External links
Rethinking Sleep(NY Times)
Segmented sleep(Harpers)
21st-century American historians
American male non-fiction writers
People from Washington, D.C.
Dartmouth College alumni
Johns Hopkins University alumni
Virginia Tech faculty
Sleep researchers
Living people
1950 births
21st-century American male writers
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