Alice Weinreb

About

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 twentieth-century Europe, the history and politics of food in Europe, the Holocaust, and European environmental history.  Prof. Weinreb's dissertation was awarded the Fritz Stern Prize by the German Historical Institute for the best North American dissertation in German History (2010), the Arthur Fondiler Dissertation Award for Best History Dissertation at the University of Michigan (2009), and the Social Science Research Council Book Fellowship to support the timely completion of a first scholarly manuscript (2010-2011).

Dr. Weinreb was awarded a 2024 NEH Fellowship to support her new project constructing a transnational history of the medical and cultural 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 will be presenting 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.”

Her 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, in order 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. Her second book traces the transnational rise of Anorexia Nervosa to the status of an epidemic during the 1970s and 1980s.

Weinreb is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan (2008-09), a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship (2006-07), the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies Fellowship (2006-07), a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2004-05) and a Rackham Regents Fellowship (2003-04).

Professor Weinreb previously taught at Utah State University and at Northwestern University, where she was a founding member of the Chicago Area Food Studies Working Group (CAFS) based at University of Illinois-Chicago. At Northwestern, Weinreb was a Teaching Fellow in the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence and nominated as a new “teacher of excellence” in 2011.

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 recent 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; cultural history; food, famine and health in the twentieth century world; European environmental history.

Courses Taught

HIST 102: The Evolution of Western Ideas and Institutions since the Seventeenth Century

HIST 300C: Food and Hunger in Modern Europe

HIST 300C: Women and the Family in 19^th and 20^th Century Europe

HIST 300C: From World War to Cold War: The Politics and Cultures of Occupied Germany

HIST 300C: Race and Racism in Modern Germany

HIST 300C: Germany since 1945

HIST 333: Germany in the Twentieth Century

HIST 334B: The Holocaust and Twentieth Century Genocide

HIST 336: Contemporary Europe, 1945 to the Present

Selected Publications

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).