Response

Benjamin Reiss

Emory University

Benjamin Reiss, Professor and Chair of English at Emory University, specializes in 19th-century American literature, disability studies, and health humanities. His most recent book, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World (Basic Books, 2017), uses literature, history, science, and psychology to explain how our society created rules and expectations for human sleep. Reiss is also the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Harvard, 2001), and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008).