Dr Diletta De Cristofaro

After a successful first season, the ‘Sleep Stories’ podcast is returning for season 2. With Durham Book Festival, we have commissioned writers Romalyn Ante, Naomi Booth and Sarah Hall to write exclusive new short stories focusing on the complex relationship women have with sleep at different stages of their lives. Each podcast’s episode/story will be introduced by a leading sleep scholar. 

Romalyn Ante is an award-winning Filipino-born British poet, novelist, and former NHS mental health nurse. Her debut poetry collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize in 2020, and her second collection, AGIMAT, was published in 2024. Her debut novel, The Left-Behind Child, was published in 2026. 

Naomi Booth is the author of the novels Raw Content and Exit Management, and the short story collection Animals at Night. Naomi teaches Creative Writing at Durham University. 

Sarah Hall has been twice nominated for the Booker Prize and is the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice. She has written 10 highly acclaimed novels including, most recently, Helm. She lives in Cumbria. 

The second season of Sleep Stories will be launching at Durham Book Festival on 11th October, 2-3pm. The writers will join Dr Diletta De Cristofaro to discuss their specially commissioned short stories.

All the Reimagining Sleep toolkits can be downloaded from one handy page by scanning the QR code below.

The toolkits support sleep health through creative, non-medical approaches. They were made by, with, and for people experiencing sleep issues relating to parenting, ageing, and the menopause.

Drawing together sleep research, art practice, and co-creation, the toolkits highlight the ways in which creativity communicates and reveals under-explored paths for those interested in sleep, and especially for those living with sleep difficulties.

The toolkits also encourage those who engage with them to contribute to the Reimagining Sleep project, aiming to involve multiple voices and foster openness, transparency, accessibility, and experimentation in sleep research.

Journalist Giuliano Aluffi wrote about the edited collection Sleep and Its Meanings for D. You can read the article (in Italian) here.

Sleep and Its Meanings: Sociocultural Investigations from Critical Studies (ed. Diletta De Cristofaro) is out with The MIT Press. You can read the blurb below and buy a copy here. An open access version of the book is also available here.

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.

The project’s latest book chapter, “Sleep Mode: Phones, Achievement-Subjects and the Sleep Crisis in Contemporary Literature”, has been published in Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), edited by Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard, and Annabel Williams.

In the chapter, Diletta De Cristofaro traces the presence of phones in a selection of contemporary literary texts featuring troubled sleepers and offers a framework to understand the pervasive cultural representations of contemporary society as suffering from poor sleep. The book is open access and you can read it here.

Explore the night-time at the Reimagining Sleep pop-up exhibition at the Late Shows (17th May, 6-10:30, Northumbria University’s Student Central), gathering a collection of maps, drawings, writings, and soundscapes made by, with, and for people with sleep issues. You’ll be invited to respond to the exhibition’s soundscapes through mark-making, helping us grow the exhibition’s collections.

The Late Shows are Newcastle’s and Gateshead’s Culture Crawl. Find out more here.

The Reimagining Sleep project was cited in an Art Monthly article by Bob Dickinson called “Rest is Resistance”, published in the magazine’s October 2024 issue. The article also referenced Dr Diletta De Cristofaro’s research on the parallels between the sleep crisis and the climate crisis.

Join Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (Assistant Professor in English Literature, Northumbria University) and Prof Jason Ellis (Professor in Psychology, Northumbria University, and Director of the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research) on Saturday 28th September 11am-12:30pm for a Morning Conversation about “Sleep Today” at The Lit&Phil in Newcastle.

Through brief presentations and group discussions, they will explore sleep in today’s world. Some of the topics and questions we will consider together include: is contemporary society experiencing a sleep crisis? How do literary, artistic, and cultural representations of sleep illuminate our relationship with the night-time? Why is sleep-tracking so popular and is it actually helpful if you’re having sleep issues?

Topics to be explored include: is society experiencing a sleep crisis, and how do literary, artistic, and cultural representations of sleep illuminate our relationship with the night-time.

Dr Diletta De Cristofaro’s work on sleep, in particular her work on sleep-tracking technologies, was cited in an article by Giuliano Aluffi for the Italian magazine D – La Repubblica, “Perché dormiamo male e poco: il sonno come problema di giustizia sociale e culturale” (translation: “Why we sleep poorly: sleep as an issue of social and cultural justice”). You can read the article, in Italian, here (paywalled).

Following our workshop series and online exhibition, we are delighted to announce that the Reimagining Sleep exhibition will be on at Newcastle City Library (level 2) from 14th to 28th March 2024.

Marking World Sleep Day (15^th March), the Reimagining Sleep exhibition explores the lived experience of sleep. The exhibition gathers a collection of objects, writings, and soundscapes made by, with, and for people with sleep issues. In a world that all too often frames sleep either as a waste of time or as a mere tool for productivity, this exhibition invites viewers to consider and reimagine their relationship with sleep. We ask: what does sleep mean to you?

The exhibition places playful collaboration at its core. As a visitor, you’ll be invited to give your input and help us grow the exhibition’s collections. Our goals are to foster wellbeing through creativity and to connect and involve multiple voices, in order to facilitate knowledge-sharing around sleep.

The exhibition programme features a public talk (14^th March, 6-7pm) by the Reimagining Sleep project Principal Investigator, Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (Northumbria University), and a creative workshop (23^rd March, 10am-12pm) with the exhibition’s curator and artist Chiara Dellerba. Both the talk and the workshop are free events but registration via Eventbrite is required.

Are We in a Sleep Crisis? An Exploration of Contemporary Culture | City Library | Level 2 | 14^th March 2024, 6-7pm

A talk by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro, Assistant Professor in English Literature at Northumbria University

In this talk, the Reimagining Sleep project Principal Investigator, Dr Diletta De Cristofaro, will explore the selection of sleep books she has curated for the exhibition. While sleep science is divided on whether we are currently experiencing a sleep crisis or not, contemporary literature is full of bad sleepers. Dr De Cristofaro will consider what literature, and culture more broadly, tell us about our relationship with sleep and the world we inhabit.

Register for the free talk here.

Oneiric Journey to the Nearby Cosmos | City Library | Level 2 | 23^rd March 2024, 10am-12pm

A creative workshop with Chiara Dellerba

Join exhibition curator and artist Chiara Dellerba in exploring how our bodies and minds react to sounds. During the workshop, you will experiment with creative writing techniques and mark-making to develop visual responses to meditative soundscapes. If you’d like, your responses will then be uploaded to the companion online exhibition, enriching its collaborative nature and the plurality of voices represented.

Places are limited – register for the free workshop here.