Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities, was interviewed by Tom Ashbook earlier in the week for On Point, an American radio chat show broadcast on the public station WBUR. The programme is distributed to over 290 radio stations across the US, and averages 2 million podcast downloads per month.
Anna was interviewed about the topic of exhaustion, following her recent book Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press in 2016), which has already provoked a large amount of media interest, and argues that extreme mental and physical exhaustion is not a modern phenomenon.
Tom Ashbrook, presenter of On Point, is a former foreign editor of The Boston Globe newspaper.
The programme was broadcast on Wednesday 16 August and can be heard here (lasting about 47 minutes long):
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2016/08/16/exhaustion-sleep-tired-history