Writing the

Sleep Crisis

Exploring representations of
sleep in contemporary culture.

Picture credit: Insomnia. Stephen Magrath. CC0 1.0 Universal

About

This research project explores how sleep, and lack thereof, is represented in contemporary writings across fiction, non-fiction, and digital culture. It’s the first study to analyse cultural engagements with the sleep crisis, namely, the sense that contemporary society is profoundly sleep-deprived.

“Writing the Sleep Crisis” is led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro. Between 2020-21 and 2022-24, the project was funded by Wellcome (Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science) and based at Northumbria University, UK. The project also involved collaborations with Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where it was based between September 2021 and August 2022 funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 892459.

Sleep and Its Meanings: Sociocultural Investigations from Critical Sleep Studies

The MIT Press (2026)

A wide-ranging collection exploring the many meanings of sleep, within the context of the humanities and social sciences.

Sleep has been an object of specialized medical research for more than a century now. Yet it is only in the twenty-first century that sleep has firmly become a significant focus for the humanities and social sciences, a growing interest that has been termed critical sleep studies. Featuring essays by leading international scholars, Sleep and Its Meanings is the first collection devoted to this multidisciplinary field. Taken together, the book’s essays probe the social, cultural, political, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic meanings of sleep. For it is only by considering these meanings that we can begin to understand sleep not just as a biological fact of life but as profoundly intertwined with the world the sleeper inhabits.

The book’s essays showcase some of the diverse disciplines that make up critical sleep studies, including both the ones that have been prominent in the field’s development from the outset—sociology, anthropology, history—and those that have turned to sleep only more recently and have therefore been so far under-represented—literary and cultural studies, as well as studies of arts, design, and media.

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Reimagining Sleep

A creative workshop series and art exhibition exploring the lived experience of sleep

For this project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust public engagement grant (2022-24), members of the public met with researchers and an artist to talk about the impact of sleep issues. Together, they discussed ways to increase awareness and improve the wellbeing of people who live with sleep disorders. They also produced creative responses about sleep, collected in an interactive online exhibition open to visitors’ submissions and in physical exhibitions at Newcastle’s City Library (14-28 March 2024) and The Late Shows (May 2025). The project also produced three toolkits, offering novel and creative methods that support sleep health and wellbeing – these can be downloaded here.

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workshop series

online exhibition

city library exhibition

download the project toolkits