Loyola University Chicago News

Associate Professor of History Alice Weinreb has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to pursue her project, “Anorexia Nervosa and the Rise of Disordered Eating in the Postwar World, 1970–2000.” The 2024 NEH application season was particularly competitive, with an 8% acceptance rate. Dr. Weinreb was one of only 82 scholars selected for the NEH’s distinguished fellowships, attesting to the excellence of her historical research. 

Using a $60,000 award from the NEH, Dr. Weinreb will be on research leave in the 2024-2025 academic year to begin drafting a book manuscript exploring how changing psychiatric approaches toward diagnosing and treating eating disorders were intertwined with the larger societal crises and conflicts of the postwar era. “When doctors grappled with the question of causality for anorexia,” Weinreb told the U.S. National Library of Medicine in a recent interview about her project, “they came (and still come) back to questions of culture and society, especially the ways in which modern society negotiates categories of race, class and gender.” 

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