Franny Nudelman is Associate Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she teaches US culture and history. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence and the Culture of War, and co-editor, with Sara Blair and Joseph Entin, of Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture After 1945.
Sleep seems to mark a realm wholly separate from public affairs, but Sleeping Soldiers reveals its methodical colonization by the US national security state and its surprising centrality to Cold War American politics and culture. Moving deftly between film and public protest, military psychiatry and veteran experience, documentation and reality, Franny Nudelman charts a fascinating pathway from the CIA mind-control experiments and the brainwashing scare of the Korean War era to the troubled sleep of the traumatized veteran, the endless wakefulness of the POW, and the emergence of a veteran's movement focused on the right to sleep in public. - Timothy Melley, author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012), Professor of English and Director of the Miami University Humanities Center.