Speakers
Franny Nudelman (English, Carleton University)
Judite Blanc (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami)
How does the sleep of individuals and populations register traumatic experiences and events, from war to natural disasters? How has sleep served to shape our understanding, treatment and experience of trauma? For our featured speakers, the question remains how sleep might also serve as an expression of resilience and resistance to the traumas it enfolds.
✦ Franny Nudelman is Professor of English at Carleton University, focusing on war in 19th and 20th century US culture. Her recent book Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military looks critically at military-scientific interventions into the troubled sleep of US combat veterans, as well the efforts of a group of Vietnam veterans to transform sleep into a form of antiwar protest.
✦ Judite Blanc is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami, having just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University School of Medicine’s Center for Healthful Behavioral Change. Her research examines the impact of traumatic and chronic stress on sleep and health outcomes, tackling racial/ethnic and gender disparities locally, nationally, and globally.
Moderated by Alanna Thain, Associate Professor of English at McGill University, director of the Moving Image Research Lab and the research team CORERISC (Epistemologies of Embodied Risk) and former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. As a co-applicant for the Sociability of Sleep project, she is interested in exploring sleep’s intimate opacities, when we become other to ourselves. Her work explores sleep’s relation to radical forms of care and relationality in queer and feminist cinema and performance and in relation to urban ecologies.
_____
The Sleep Salons are curated by Josh Dittrich (Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal), Aleksandra Kaminska (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), and Alanna Thain (Associate Professor, McGill University). They are part of a year-long series:
Salon 1: The Social Lives of Sleep, ft. M. Wolf-Meyer & C. Alcántara: September 29
Salon 2: The Future of (the History of) Sleep, ft. K. Kroker & B. Reiss: October 13
Salon 3: Traumatic Sleep, ft. F. Nudelman & J. Blanc: November 17
Salon 4: Controlling Dreams, ft. A. Zadra & E. Solomonava: December 8
The Sociability of Sleep is two-year research program that explores both everyday and exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. Launching our programming this Fall are the Sleep Salons, monthly public sessions featuring scholars, artists, and researchers on sleep, showcasing innovative research though conversations that examine how we learn and know about sleep, and that question and expand the methodologies, epistemologies, and equities of sleep knowledge. Exploring the value of sleep research in art and design, humanities, and social sciences, and taking experiential, experimental, critical, and sociable approaches to sleep, each monthly Salon pairs short talks (ca. 25 minutes) from two featured speakers to generate interdisciplinary insights in the ensuing discussion about the sociability of sleep.
The Sociability of Sleep and its Sleep Salons are supported by funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).