Stern Prize Recipient Honored with Fraenkel Prize

Alice Weinreb, a 2010 recipient of Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, has been awarded the 2017 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Wiener Library (London) for her book 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 in announcing the Fraenkel Prize, the Wiener Library wrote,  "This is a most thought-provoking book which is ambitious in the best sense, bringing together German and European history with food studies in a most imaginative way. Her insights, articulated within the course of a wide-ranging and compelling narrative, shed new and important light on a whole host of issues."

Alice Weinreb is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She is the seventh Stern Prize recipient who has either won the Fraenkel Prize or received commendation from the selection committee.