Roger Ekirch

Roger Ekirch is an award-winning historian, whose writings have been translated into eight languages. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he obtained his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Since 1977, he has taught at Virginia Tech. Along with three other books and sundry scholarly articles, he has written columns for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His path-breaking research on the history of sleep has been profiled in publications ranging from the Smithsonian Magazine and the Financial Times to Applied Neurology and Scientific American Mind. Professor Ekirch has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 1981-1982 became the first Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University. In 1998, he received a coveted Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. His last book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), won four awards, including a prize given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history.