Virginia Tech History Department

Profile

Roger Ekirch is an award-winning writer and a professor of history at Virginia Tech. Their writing happens to be converted into nine languages. Although colonial The united states additionally the United states Revolution stay their teaching interests, their research has ranged commonly to incorporate European including United states history - even reputation for sleep, a far more present concern.

Their newest book, Birthright: the real tale of the Kidnapping of Jemmy Annelsey (W.W. Norton, 2010), recounts the real-life tale that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular novel, Kidnapped. Set from the volatile backdrop of Georgian Ireland, Birthright resurrects a fantastic family crisis of betrayal and loss, and endurance, success, and redemption. The storyline is the centerpiece of a BBC television documentary, “Kidnapped” (2011), that Professor Ekirch served while the system expert and a commentator.

Along with scholarly articles in such journals because the William and Mary Quarterly, and Perspectives in American background, his writing has actually starred in the nyc occasions, Harper’s mag, the Global Herald Tribune, and Richmond Times-Dispatch. He could be a frequent guide reviewer for Wall Street Journal. Professor Ekirch is interviewed from the BBC, CBC, “Morning Edition, ” “Talk of the Nation, ” “On Point, ” “Weekend Edition, ” and “Saturday Afternoon at Opera, ” as well as on “Book TV, ” “The background Channel, ” PBS’s “Points of View, ” and BBC's "One Show." His path-breaking focus on the real history of segmented sleep has revamped standard assumptions about normal peoples slumber. With far-reaching ramifications the research of modern sleep problems, it has been profiled in magazines which range from the Washington Post in addition to Financial occasions to used Neurology while the Smithsonian mag. The government of Japan has actually integrated his analysis into nationwide guidelines for rest health, as has got the great britain Sleep Council. "lots of people wake-up through the night and anxiety, " observed Professor Russell Foster, seat of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford, when you look at the BBC News mag. "we inform them that what they're experiencing is a throwback towards bi-modal sleep design." In articles in Scientific United states Mind, Walter A. Brown, M.D. of Brown University health School marveled, “The way to obtain this brand-new assault on mainstream reasoning comes not from a drug business or a university analysis system but from a historian.”

Early in the day publications have actually included Bound for The united states: The transport of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, posted in 1987 by Clarendon/Oxford University Press, as well as Day’s Close: evening previously (W.W. Norton, 2005), a panoramic study of nocturnal tradition prior to the Industrial Revolution (now in its 7th printing) which garnered four awards, including a prize provided by a brief history honor society Phi Alpha Theta the “best subsequent book” in all areas of record. His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber when you look at the Brit Isles, ” in the United states Historical Evaluation, earned two awards, like the James L. Clifford reward given by the United states community for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

During Professor Ekirch’s job, he has received four fellowships from National Endowment the Humanities, and in 1981-1982 he became the initial Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University, where he taught when you look at the Faculty of History and resided as a Fellow Commoner at Peterhouse. In 1998, he was granted a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship “on the foundation of unusually distinguished achievement in the past and exemplary guarantee for future accomplishment.”

He got three prizes from Virginia Tech during 2009: the Alumni Award for analysis Excellence (the greatest prize provided by the institution for professors scholarship); the College of liberal-arts and Human Sciences Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Scholarship; and Faculty Excellence Award, presented yearly by graduate students into the Department of History. Listed here 12 months, the Virginia personal Science Association bestowed its “Scholar Award ever.”

Information That Is Personal

Roger Ekirch came to be in Washington, D.C. Raised in Alexandria, Virginia and Delmar, ny, he graduated cum laude with greatest distinction in history from Dartmouth university in 1972. Obtaining their M.A. and Ph.D. levels from Johns Hopkins University, he attained Virginia Tech in 1977. He and his partner, Alice, and their three kiddies make their home on Sugarloaf hill in Roanoke County. He is represented by the literary representative Georges Borchardt of Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022.