Tuesday, 15 March, 5pm                            Interiors Lecture Series:  Emily Martin, New York University

Casken Theatre, Martin Harris Centre     ‘Sleepless in America’        

 

Abstract:

Exploring historical and ethnographic materials from the U.S. since WW II, I ask how and why sleep has recently become a complex management project dependent on discipline and attention.  Even dreaming (for Freud, a chance to hear the unconscious within the interior mind) has become an activity that can be optimized for increased productivity. Research from American public health experts and sleep scientists together with incitements from the bedding industry and the pharmaceutical industry have contributed to making American sleep an enterprise that demands continuous labor rather than providing “sore labour’s bath.”

Emily Martin teaches anthropology at New York University. She is the author of The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Beacon Press 1987), Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS  (Beacon Press, 1994) and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Wednesday 16 March    12-2                       Emily Martin Masterclass

Samuel Alexander: A104                               (with Monica Pearl, EAS and Jeanette Edwards,    

                                                                        Anthropology)

 

for further details of the masterclass and for readings: see SAGE blog or CIDRA PG page:

http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/cidra/postgraduate/index.htm

 

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