Contributor

A. Roger Ekirch

Author, Professor of History at Virginia Tech

A. Roger Ekirch is an award-winning author, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and a professor of history at Virginia Tech. He took his A.B. from Dartmouth College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. He was the inaugural Paul Mellon Fellow in History at Cambridge University and a Fellow Commoner at Peterhouse. His path-breaking work on the history of segmented sleep, published in At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (W.W. Norton, 2005), has revamped traditional assumptions about normal human slumber. With far-reaching implications for the study of modern sleep disorders, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal, for which he is a regular book reviewer. A frequent keynote speaker, Professor Ekirch has been interviewed on the BBC, CBC, “Morning Edition,” “Talk of the Nation,” “On Point,” and “Weekend Edition,” as well as on “Book TV,” “The History Channel,” PBS’s “Points of View,” Canadian Public Television, and the BBC's "One Show.” The government of Japan has incorporated his research into national guidelines for sleep hygiene, as has the United Kingdom Sleep Council. In an article in Scientific American Mind, Walter A. Brown, M.D. of Brown University Medical School marveled, “The source of this new assault on conventional thinking comes not from a drug company or a university research program but from a historian.”

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