Martin Willis (Cardiff University): Sleeping Beauties: Victorian Representations of Disordered Sleeping

What impact did the fairy tale of sleeping beauty have on the emerging science of sleep in the Victorian period? In this talk I will investigate the entanglement of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty with sleep medicine as well as popular media representations of unusual sleeping. As I will show, sleep disorders illuminate a series of representations of sleep that bring the physiology of the human body into intimate correlation with socio-economic power.

Melanie Fleming (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford): Sleep and recovery after brain injury

How can we harness the sleeping brain for learning? In this talk I will talk about the importance of sleep for learning and memory. I will discuss the impact of brain injury, such as stroke, on sleep and ways to improve sleep processes.