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Sasha Handley

Prof

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4662-7162

Accepting PhD Students

Personal profile

Biography

Sasha Handley specialises in the early modern British Isles, with a particular interest in the medical and environmental humanities. Her research examines aspects of domestic health care (especially sleep practices), supernatural beliefs and storytelling (especially relating to women's histories), and material culture methodologies.

She teaches courses in early modern British, European, and world history, and methods classes relating to material culture. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and former Associate Research Director (Research Impact) for the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures at the University of Manchester.

 

Sasha currently leads the Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective at the University of Manchester and she is Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World: An Environmental Approach to the History of Sleep Care. 

Research interests

Healthier Futures
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 recovers the principal agents, materials and epistemologies that were used to manage sleep in ecologically distinct parts of Britain, Ireland and England’s emergent colonies in America and the Caribbean, 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, 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) funded a successful programme of wellbeing workshops, and a self-led wellbeing trail for Salford residents at Ordsall Hall.
 
Book Projects
  • The Haunting at the Rectory: Ghost Stories and Early Modern Women's Lives. 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).

 

  • '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. 

 

Prizes and awards

Research Funding

  • AHRC Impact Accelerator Award (2024-25), (PI), 'Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall'
  • Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (PI) (2021-26), 'Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World: An Environmental Approach to the History of Sleep Care'
  • Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Award (PI) (2022-24)
  • Australian Research Council Discovery Award (Partner Investigator) 'Albrecht Dürer's Material World in Melbourne, Manchester and Nuremberg' (2021-25)
  • Folger Shakespeare Library Visiting Researcher Fellowship (2019-20)
  • Being Human Festival, Small Award (2017-18), 'Sleep: Lost and Found' (2017-18)
  • Visiting Research Fellow, Moore Institute, NUI Galway (2017-18)
  • AHRC Follow-On Funding Award for the project 'How we used to sleep' (2017-18)
  • Visiting Research Fellow, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (2016-17)
  • British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship: 'Sleep in Early Modern England' (2015-16)
  • Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2015-16)
  • Humanities Strategic Investment Fund Award (with Dr Jennifer Spinks), 'Embodied Emotions in the Early Modern World', University of Manchester and University of Melbourne (2015-16)
  • MICRA  (Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing) Seminar Award (with Professor Julie-Marie Strange): 'Age and the Body: Identity and Image in Later Life' (4 December 2015)
  • ESRC Impact Acceleration Award (with Professor Hannah Barker and Dr Charlotte Wildman): Making History Public (2015-16)
  • John Rylands Research Institute Seed Corn Funding, 'Magic and the Natural World in Early Modern Europe' (2013) with Dr Jenny Spinks
  • AHRC Early Career Fellowship: ‘Bedroom Stories in Early Modern England’ (2011)
  • Research Fellowship: ‘Making Publics: Media, Markets and Associations in Early Modern Europe’: McGill University (2009)
  • Simon Research Fellowship: University of Manchester (2007-9)
  • Scouloudi Fellowship: Institute of Historical Research (2004-5)
  • Doctoral Fellowship Award: Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick (2004)

Opportunities

I have supervised a number of MA and PhD students (many with AHRC, ESRC or Wellcome Trust funding) and I welcome enquiries from students interested in any aspect of social and cultural history in the early modern period. 

External positions

External Examiner, University of Exeter

2021 → 2025

External Examiner, University of Birmingham

2017 → 2020

External Examiner, University of Hertfordshire

2016 → 2019

Areas of expertise

  • D204 Modern History
  • D901 Europe (General)

Research Highlights, Institutes and Platforms

  • Creative Manchester
  • Healthier Futures
  • John Rylands Research Institute and Library

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  1. SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
    SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being
  2. SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
    SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities
  3. SDG 13 - Climate Action
    SDG 13 Climate Action

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