Sasha Handley

Tackling Health Inequalities

Sasha is Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Investigator Award, Sleeping well in the early modern world: an environmental approach to the history of sleep care . The project reconstructs the principal agents, materials and ‘environing’ practices that were used to manage sleep in ecologically distinct parts of Britain, Ireland and England’s emergent colonies of Virginia and Newfoundland, alongside the bodies of medical, botanical, climatic and material knowledge associated with them. The research brings a fresh environmental history perspective to cross-disciplinary debates about the significance that physical environments play in shaping healthy and unhealthy sleep habits.

A Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment (Public Engagement) award supported the research impact project Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall. The project developed historic planting schemes at Ordsall Hall, a suite of sleep-themed public programming, and supporting materials for Salford schools to improve the health education and health outcomes of school-age children in Salford. An AHRC Impact Accelerator Award (2024-25) is funding a new phase of this project, piloting wellbeing workshops at Ordsall hall.

Book Projects

• The Haunting at the Rectory: A Story about Women who wanted to be heard is under contract with Doubleday. The book recovers the long history of women’s engagement with ghost reports to negotiate relationships of hierarchy and dependence in a deeply patriarchal society.
• Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2016) won the Social History Society's annual book prize in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and the Longman-History Today Prize in 2017. Research funding came from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University).
• My first monograph 'Visions of an Unseen World' (Pickering & Chatto, 2007) examined the vibrancy and circulation of ghost stories and ghost beliefs in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English culture - a period often associated with declining interest in supernatural phenomena.

Exhibition Projects

• I co-curated the 2023-24 exhibition, Albrecht Dürer's Material World, at The Whitworth in 2023-24 and contributed to the exhibition catalogue of the same name. A virtual tour of the exhibition can be found here. The research and exhibition project was funded by the Australian Research Council and the Getty Foundation. 
• In 2016 I co-curated the exhibition 'Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World' at the John Rylands Library with Dr Jennifer Spinks (University of Melbourne).