Spotlight on Sasha Handley
Sasha talks about the history of sleep, a major grant from the Wellcome Trust, and her thoughts on community engagement.
Sasha Handley, Professor of Early Modern History in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, has recently received a research grant to investigate the development of a culture of ‘sleep care’ in Britain, Ireland and England’s American colonies between 1500 and 1750.
Why did you choose sleep as an area of research?
I chose to study sleep's history because so little had been written on the subject and I was genuinely curious to know how our ancestors had experienced and managed such an important aspect of human life. This work also has really important implications for current healthcare strategies around sleep.
Can you tell us more about this amazing grant, and what you hope the impact will be?
The Wellcome Trust Investigator Award identifies sleep habits as a set of historically-situated environmental practices. It will recover the efforts and motivations of past peoples to sleep well, and the ways that they engaged with their distinctive surroundings to manage sleep's timings and its material conditions. The project takes account of indigenous medical knowledge and practices in colonial settings; diverse climates and topographies within and beyond Europe; the ecological diversity of different locales; and the increasingly globalised nature of early modern foodways and botanicals. The project will also be the first to assess the impact of early modern processes of environmental change upon sleep practices (e.g. the 'little ice age', large-scale agricultural change, and rapid urbanisation). I hope the project will nudge the field of sleep research away from its obsession with sleep disorders, and shift the tone of healthcare conversations around sleep from 'crisis' to 'care'.
How do you involve the community in your research, and why do you think that’s so important?
Historians come in many different forms and they are often found outside the confines of the university campus. I often learn as much from conversations with community groups, charity and heritage organisations, and from history students at primary and secondary schools as I do from my wonderful colleagues. I'm always eager to co-produce or share my research with a wide range of people. For this project, I hope to work alongside schools and heritage organisations in Manchester and Salford to develop new hands-on educational programming that prioritises outdoor learning and that supports students to become sleep experts by helping them to design soporific planting schemes, and to recreate historical recipes that were designed to cultivate a good night's sleep.
What would you say has been your biggest personal victory (apart from the grant!) over the past three months?
My biggest personal victory is probably my rapid transition to online teaching, either that or a marginal improvement in my DIY skills. But I tend to prefer collective victories these days so I was delighted to see that my department (History) is doing so well in the university league tables, and that my colleagues and our students are busy winning awards for inclusive teaching and learning initiatives, and supporting action to improve racial, gender and social equality.