Hannah Huber appointed first Postdoctoral Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Institute for the Humanities and University Library

Hannah Huber earned her doctorate in English from the University of South Carolina, and her dissertation utilized digital repositories to reveal how U.S. literature exposed an important shift in cultural sleep patterns at the onset of modernity. An excerpt from her dissertation, an essay on pathological restlessness in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, was published in the Winter 2016 issue of Studies in American Literary Naturalism and awarded the Robert H. Elias Essay Prize by the International Theodore Dreiser Society. Her research specialties include nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Literature, women’s and gender studies, digital humanities, and medicine and literature. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary, digital history website that will enable visitors to visualize trends in U.S. sleep culture. Such interactive tools will illuminate the chronological and geospatial developments of sleep terminology and cultural practices by bridging fictional representations of insomnia, historical sleep debates, and contemporary sleep science. In making these common threads more visible, Hannah’s website will underscore environmental and social factors that have historically affected individuals’ access to and quality of sleep, as well as the dangers that sleep deprivation continues to pose to marginalized populations.

Hannah can be reached at h1huber@uic.edu and will have an office in the Institute for the Humanities. Please welcome Hannah and watch for announcements about workshops for faculty and students.

The UIC Digital Humanities Initiative, a new collaboration between the Institute for the Humanities and the Library, is designed to expose faculty and students to research in digital humanities and new research methods in that field. This initiative is generously supported by a University of Illinois Presidential Grant to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities.