Alice Weinreb Awarded Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize

Alice Weinreb, a 2010 recipient of Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, has been awarded the inaugural Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany. The Fritz Stern Prize is awarded annually by the Friends of the German Historical Institute to the best dissertation in German or German-American history submitted to a North American University. The Stern Prize selection committee noted that Weinreb's dissertation, from which Modern Hungers grew, "combines in a wonderful and impressive scholarly manner a series of consequential historical topics, memory and identity, barbarism and victimhood with what would seem the most prosaic ones, such workplace canteens and the provision of school lunches. Its empirical richness combined with its strong conceptual framework make this work an excellent vehicle for interrogating our categories of prosperity and want, wartime and peacetime, capitalist and socialist, German and other." Echoing that assessment, the Waterloo Center for German Studies Prize jury called Modern Hungers “a page-turner, with fascinating facts running counter to modern stories about the past on every page.” Prof. Weinreb’s study, the jury wrote, “uncovers the intricacies of the relationship between food and power, showing food and hunger as instruments of power.” 

Alice Weinreb is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. In 2017, she was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Wiener Library (London) for Modern Hungers. She is the seventh Stern Prize recipient who has either won the Fraenkel Prize or received commendation from the selection committee.