Alice Weinreb
Associate Professor
On leave, 2024-25 Academic Year
Alice Weinreb (PhD, University of Michigan, 2009; M.A., Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 2003; B.A., Columbia University, 1999) is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where she teaches courses in the history of psychiatry; twentieth-century Europe, the politics of food and hunger; and memory and the Holocaust.
Her first book, Modern Hungers: Food, and Power in Twentieth Century Germany, was published with Oxford University Press in 2017 and received the 2017 Wiener Library Fraenkel Book Prize in Contemporary History and the inaugural 2017 Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. It brings together the history of state policies, famine and mass violence, and everyday food preparation and consumption to trace the history and legacies of the two World Wars and the Cold War. Weinreb’s articles have appeared in Central European History, German Studies Review, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, and Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte, as well as being included in several anthologies.
Dr. Weinreb was awarded a 2024 NEH Fellowship to support her new project, tracing a transnational history of the construction of eating disorders as a category of mental illness in the last decades of the twentieth century. Here is a link to an interview with Dr. Weinreb about her work related to the Fellowship. On February 8, 2024, Dr. Weinreb presented the 15th Annual James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine - “Anorexia in the Archives: Documenting the Late Twentieth Century Rise in Eating Disorders.” She also recently published an essay on her early research, Anorexia Nervosa: Hilde Bruch and the Construction of Eating Disorders.
Here is an interview with Prof. Weinreb on her first book: http://newbooksnetwork.com/alice-weinreb-modern-hungers-food-and-power-in-twentieth-century-germany-oxford-up-2017/.
You can read a blog entry on her research on the international politics of hunger: http://foodfatnessfitness.com/2018/11/01/postwar-hunger-in-germany/
Research Interests
Modern Europe; twentieth-century Germany; psychiatry; food, famine and health in the twentieth century world; history of the body
Courses Taught
HIST 102: The Evolution of Western Ideas and Institutions since the Seventeenth Century
PSYCH 386: History of Psychiatry: Research Seminar on Eating Disorders
HIST 331A: Food Hunger and Power in the Modern World
HIST 300C: Women and the Family in 19th and 20th Century Europe
HIST 300C: Race and Racism in Modern Germany
HIST 334B: History and Memory of the Holocaust
Publications/Research Listings
“Anorexia Nervosa and the Weight of the Holocaust,” forthcoming in Isis: Journal of the History of Science, Spring 2025
Modern Hungers: Food, War, and Germany in the Twentieth Century . (Oxford University Press, May 2017).
“Embodying German Suffering: Rethinking Popular Hunger during the Hunger Years,” Body Politics. Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte (3) Fall 2013.
“Hot Lunches in the Cold War: The Politics of School Lunches in Divided Germany” in Karen Hagemann and Sonja Michel, eds., Gender and the Long Postwar: Reconsiderations of the United States and the Two Germanys 1945-1989 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2013).
“For the Hungry have no Past nor do they belong to a Political Party: Debates over German Hunger after World War II,” Central European History (44:1) March 2012.
“The Tastes of Home: Cooking the Lost Heimat in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s,” German Studies Review (34:2) May 2011.
“Die sozialistische Schulspeisung: Kinder, Mütter und die Bedeutung der Arbeit in der DDR” in Matthias Middell and Felix Wemheuer, eds., Hunger, Ernährung und Rationierungssysteme unter dem Staatssozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011).