Current News & Events
Past News & Events >Please note that all academic job postings are now posted only on the Human Resources website and all applications must be submitted online here.
August 22, 2025 | Graduate Studies
Congratulations to Dr. Amala Poli on Successful Doctoral Defense
We are pleased to announce that Amala Poli has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, titled "Risk(in)g Sleep: A Health Humanities Study of Sleep Paralysis."
The sleep crisis refers to a growing concern with sleep quality and quantity today, especially in the Western world. A rise in awareness about sleep’s benefits for longevity has concomitantly given greater purchase to emergent neuroscientific research that seeks to demystify sleep and fix its disorderly forms. Questioning the capitalist stakes of improving sleep, critical sleep scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences have responded by recognizing the wellness industry’s economic motivations in attending to the elusive notion of good sleep.
Within this context, this thesis explores sleep paralysis, a liminal state between sleep and wakefulness marked by immobilization, hallucinations, and intense somatic sensations. Long a subject of literary fascination, sleep paralysis offers a rich site for interrogating how embodied experiences of sleep and sleep consciousness exceed biomedical explanation. Using a Health Humanities framework, I propose the concept of sleep horror to indicate a composite of felt sensations and embodied experience. By resisting efforts to solve the last great biological mystery and fix wild sleep, the literary/visual encounters generated by sleep horror, I contend, challenge biomedical language to offer alternatives to its scientific empiricism.
Chapter 1 traces the historical roots of the sleep crisis and sleep paralysis; Chapter 2 analyzes Gothic nightmares in late 19th-century British fiction -- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Great God Pan (1894), and Dracula (1897) -- as sites of psychic transference; Chapter 3 studies The Haunting of Hill House (1959 novel and 2018 Netflix series) as a challenge to medical understandings of sleep paralysis as harmless; and Chapter 4 examines how metaphors of sleep paralysis intersect with race, climate, and gender in Get Out (2017), The Marrow Thieves (2017), and The Babadook (2014), thus troubling claims to sleep’s universality.
August 14, 2025 | Western News
Western Welcomes Writer-in-Residence Anna Chatterton
Anna Chatterton, Western's 2025-26 writer-in-residence, is a playwright and librettist (writer of opera). Her plays Within the Glass and Gertrude and Alice were finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama.
August 7, 2025 | Toronto Star
Travel Writing Instructor Explores Canada’s Mountain Biking Capital
Writing 2219F/G – World Travels: Introduction to Travel Writing instructor Melanie Chambers brings Rossland’s epic trail network to life in her recent Toronto Star travel feature.
August 1, 2025 | Western News
Western Researchers Recovering Black History in London, Ont.
The Black Londoners Project, led by English and Writing studies professors Miranda Green-Barteet and Alyssa MacLean, continues to retrace the lives of 16 freedom seekers whose early presence helped shape the city's landscape.
July 2, 2025 | Graduate Studies
CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award
Congratulations to Dr Melanie Byron, PhD'24, whose dissertation has been selected by Western's School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for nomination to the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) for the 2025 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts category.
