Profile

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 eleven 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 American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Past & Present, Sleep, and Sleep Health, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, 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,”  France Culture, “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. “This is one of the most astounding historical discoveries of the last twenty years,” Pascal Riché  recently declared in L’Obs, France’s premier news magazine. A former member of the editorial board of Sleep Health: The Journal of the National Sleep Foundation, Prof. Ekirch 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. 

Since 2018, Prof. Ekirch has been honored to be a guest lecturer in the  MSc program in sleep medicine in Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences. More recently, he has contributed a lecture  for the online course "From Sleep Disorders to Sleep Health" at the University of Michigan. With far-reaching implications for the study of modern sleep disorders, his research has been profiled in feature articles in more than one hundred international newspapers and magazines. “Many people wake up at night and panic. I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throw-back to the bi-modal sleep pattern,” Russell Foster, chair of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, observed in the Feb. 2012 issue of the BBC News Magazine featuring Ekirch’s work. “Professor Ekirch has made a major contribution to both the history and our scientific understanding of sleep,” according to Charles Czeisler, director of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine. “His findings have led to changes in the practice of sleep disorders medicine, particularly for patients with middle-of-the-night insomnia — quite a feat for a historian." 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.” His scholarship has inspired art exhibitions at the Galleria Raucci Santamaria in Naples, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Bonniers Konsthall Museum of Contemporary Art in Stockholm. He has also spoken on "The History of Sleep" as part of a podcast series on mindfulness and art at the John Paul Getty Art Museum. 

Prof. Ekirch is currently completing a book  provisionally titled "The Town That Cried Wolf: Louvain's War in Peace, 1914-1940." Earlier books have included American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution, published in February 2017 by Pantheon, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, and a “Main Selection” of the History Book Club; Birthright: The True Story that Inspired “Kidnapped” (W.W. Norton, 2010); At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (W.W. Norton, 2005), a panoramic study of nocturnal culture before the Industrial Revolution (now in its tenth printing) which garnered four prizes, among them an award given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history; Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, published in 1987 by Clarendon/Oxford University Press; and “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729-1776 (University of North Carolina Press, 1981). His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” in the American Historical Review, earned two awards, including the James L. Clifford Prize given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. 

Ekirch is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians at Columbia University. During the course of his career, he has received four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1981–1982 he became the first Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University, where he taught in the Faculty of History and resided as a Fellow Commoner at Peterhouse. In 1998, he was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. At Virginia Tech, Ekirch has received the Phi Beta Kappa Sturm Award in 2006, the Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2009, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Scholarship in 2009 and 2015, and the Faculty Excellence Award, presented annually by graduate students in the Department of History in 2009. The following year, the Virginia Social Science Association bestowed upon him its “Scholar Award in History.” In 2022, he received one of twelve "Outstanding Faculty Awards" from the State Council for Higher Education for Virginia - the state's highest honor for a professor.

Ekirch graduated cum laude with highest distinction  in history  from Dartmouth College in 1972. He earned his master's degree and doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1977.