Dr. Alice Weinreb.

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.”  

An ad for Glendale Adventist Medical Center's Eating Disorders Program.

Through her research, Dr. Weinreb will use the past to illuminate current conversations on mental health. As she told Loyola’s College of Arts and Sciences, history is essential to contextualize and even change contemporary approaches to understanding and treating eating disorders. “By applying an analytical gaze on primary sources of the past,” she says, “we can identify and suggest new ways to understand our current mental health crisis.”

At Loyola, Dr. Weinreb has brought her research project directly into the classroom. In Fall 2023, she taught HIST 300E: History of Psychiatry: Research Seminar on Eating Disorders, 1970-2000, where students conducted original research in a seminar format and presented their work in an end-of-semester symposium. She has also supervised more than a dozen student interns who have worked with her on constructing a digital archive to support research into eating disorders. Students interested in learning more about Dr. Weinreb’s project can view her recent lecture at the U.S. National Library of Medicine on NIH VideoCasting.

Congratulations, Dr. Weinreb!