A. Roger Ekirch

A.Roger Ekirch is an award-winning author and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. His writing has been translated into ten languages. Although early America remains his teaching interest, his research has ranged widely to include European as well as American history — even the history of sleep.                                                                                                         

In addition to scholarly articles in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly, Past & Present, and Sleep, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Humanities, Harper’s Magazine, the Huffington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, for which he is a regular book reviewer. Ekirch has been interviewed on the BBC, CBC, “Morning Edition,” “Talk of the Nation,” “On Point,” and “Weekend Edition,” as well as on “Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley,” “BBC One,” “Book TV,” “The History Channel,” PBS’s “Points of View,” Canadian Public Television, and the BBC’s “One Show.” In 2011, his fourth monograph, Birthright (W.W. Norton, 2010) inspired the BBC television documentary “Kidnapped” (2011), for which Ekirch served as the program consultant and a commentator.

His latest book, La Grande Transformation du Sommeil: Comment la Révolution Industrielle a Bouleversé Nos Nuits [The Great Sleep Transformation : How the Industrial Revolution Changed Our Nights], published in January 2021 by Éditions Amsterdam in Paris, consists of articles, including two of his own, devoted to his sleep research and its impact.

His path-breaking work uncovering the history of “segmented sleep” prior to the twentieth century has revamped traditional assumptions about normal human slumber. A member of the editorial board of Sleep Health: The Journal of the National Sleep Foundation, he has given keynote addresses to medical gatherings in Kyoto, Cambridge (United Kingdom), Göttingen, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Denver, and in London at the Royal Society of Medicine, as well as grand rounds talks to medical staff at Roanoke Memorial Hospital and the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington.