Books
I am the author of The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020), which offers a new critical model for our cultural obsession with the apocalypse and considers popular novels like The Road, Station Eleven, and Cloud Atlas. You can read the book’s introduction below. I am also the editor of Sleep and Its Meanings: Sociocultural Investigations from Critical Sleep Studies, (The MIT Press, 2026). This is the first collection dedicated to the emerging multidisciplinary field of critical sleep studies.
I’m currently working on two further book projects. The first is a cultural history of the sleep crisis, today’s widespread sleep deprivation. The second is Douglas Coupland’s Literature and Art: The Extreme Present, an edited collection of essays on cult writer and artist Douglas Coupland, co-edited with Andrew Tate and Mary McCampbell, and forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
Out now with The MIT Press
Sleep and Its Meanings
Sociocultural Investigations from Critical Sleep Studies
A wide-ranging collection exploring the many meanings of sleep, within the context of the humanities and social sciences.
Sleep has been an object of specialized medical research for more than a century now, yet it is only in the twenty-first century that sleep has become a significant focus across the humanities and social sciences, a growing interest that has been termed critical sleep studies. Featuring essays by leading international scholars, Sleep and Its Meanings is the first collection devoted to this multidisciplinary field. These essays probe the social, cultural, political, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic meanings of sleep. For it is only by considering these meanings that we can begin to understand sleep not just as a biological fact of life but as profoundly intertwined with the world the sleeper inhabits.
The book showcases some of the diverse disciplines that make up critical sleep studies, including both the ones that have been prominent in the field’s development from the outset—sociology, anthropology, history—and those that have turned to sleep only more recently and have therefore been so far underrepresented—literary and cultural studies, as well as studies of arts, design, and media.
Out in paperback with Bloomsbury
The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel
Critical Temporalities and the End Times
Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed?
The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with “the end” by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature’s most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity’s apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.
You can find the book in major bookshops like Blackwell’s, Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
Praise for The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel
Set to become a landmark study of 21st century fiction, this wide-ranging, thought-provoking study is an invaluable resource, representing original work of the highest order, from a writer both engagingly readable and critically sophisticated.
Judie Newman, Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
A theoretical tour de force . . . building on a rich and comprehensive foundation of critical writing about modernity, history, time, and apocalyptic logic.
The Year’s Work in English Studies. Read the full review here.
The treatment of the works in The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel is accessible and lucidly presented. The extensive and effective footnoting offers further avenues for exploration, and the comprehensive explanations of De Cristofaro’s theorization of critical temporalities ethically and accessibly integrates theory across schools and disciplines to produce a rigorously interdisciplinary work.
Chelsea Haith, University of Oxford. Read the full review in Extrapolation.
This book offers a well-structured overview and analysis of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels. It convincingly demonstrates the topicality of the issue by linking it to major current social challenges caused by neoliberal capitalism and its accompanying oppressive structures and escalating risks, post-colonialism and the ecological difficulties of the Anthropocene. Its discussion of questions of agency brings the agency of literature in these crucial developments to the fore. This monograph thus nicely demonstrates the social relevance of literature and literary analysis.
Forum for Modern Language Studies. Read the full review here.
This monograph is a valuable interdisciplinary intervention that provides a convincing and timely approach as well as detailed references to many texts capable of supporting a broad range of scholarship. … De Cristofaro has given us that rare work that functions on an advanced theoretical level while also nonetheless being applicable to many classroom contexts.
Nathaniel Doherty, Chadron State College. Read the full review in The SFRA Review here.
[I]nteresting and thought-provoking. De Cristofaro’s study creates an impetus to reframe not only critical thinking around post-apocalyptic narratives, but also the practical aspect of creating them. Few are examining the critical temporalities of contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives in this way, and I certainly have never viewed them through this specific lens. De Cristofaro’s analysis, in the context of temporal inversion, provides compelling ground for scholars and students to return to the novels she discusses in order to reconsider their dimensions in terms of a reimagined temporality.
Leks Drakos. Read the full review in C21 Literature here.
[A] deep immersion in the intriguing contemporary phenomenon of ostensibly more serious writers dabbling in genre fiction. … [E]ssential reading for scholars working in the area of time studies, whether in specifically literary contexts or more broadly.
Thomas Allen, University of Ottawa. Read the full review in the Journal of American Studies here
Ilaria Biano, Università degli Studi di Torino. Read the full review in the Journal of Ecohumanism here
The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel boldly advances an innovative critical framerork that is rooted in previous studies while also opening up new avenues of inquiry in the area. It is also well-grounded in a more general social and cultural critique of contemporary society – of the Anthropocene.
Read the introduction below
Books in Progress
Writing the Sleep Crisis
I’m working on my second single-authored book, a cultural history of the sleep crisis across fiction, non-fiction and digital culture. While sleep experts are divided on whether our society is suffering from a crisis of poor sleep, the sense of widespread sleep deprivation has captured the popular imagination. My book, the first exploration of cultural engagements with the sleep crisis, considers what these representations of sleep tell us about our society. I cover aspects ranging from mental health to our sense of self, from our relationship with technology to social inequalities, the rhythms of work and day-to-day life, and the pressures these rhythms exercise on us.
This project is supported by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission.
Douglas Coupland’s Literature and Art: The Extreme Present | Bloomsbury, forthcoming
With Andrew Tate and Mary McCampbell, I’m editing the first collection of essays devoted to cult writer and artist Douglas Coupland. This project originated from the conference celebrating Coupland’s oeuvre we organised in April 2021.