Joan Jacobs Brumberg

Researcher and author

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is internationally known for her research and writing about the history of American girls, including the prize-winning books Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa As a Modern Disease (1988) and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997) which is a classic on American college campuses.

In 2004, she published Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer, a true story of adolescent boys and violence in l9th century America which was used in the campaign against the juvenile death penalty. She also collaborated with photographer Lauren Greenfield in Girl Culture and Thin and, most recently, contributed a social history of the "cutting" epidemic to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Brumberg, who is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor Emerita at Cornell University, has been a guest on Today, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Fresh Air as well as many other American and Canadian television and radio programs that cover social issues concerning women and girls. Her books have been translated into a number of languages and she appeared in Katherine Gilday's Canadian Broadcasting documentary, "The Famine Within" (1990), a cultural exploration of the pursuit of thinness in North America, as well as the NOVA film (2002), "Dying to Be Thin", a scientific investigation of eating disorders and their causes and treatment. In 2005, The Body Project inspired a play of the same name at Horizons Theatre in Washington DC, the oldest feminist theatre company in North America.

In The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Brumberg doesn't just explain how the American girl's relationship to her body has changed over the past 100 years, she reveals why the body has become an all-consuming project and why "girlhood [has become] something of an endangered status." Drawing on the intimate and unpublished diaries of American girls from the 1830's to today and photographs that underscore how girls' bodies have changed over the last century, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls unlocks the mystery of what it means and how it feels to grow up in a female body - to get at "the heart" of being a girl.

In The Body Project, Brumberg explains:
. How girls' bodies and their sexuality have actually changed since the Victorian era
. What has happened to the mother-daughter connection in America
. How Education about sexuality and maturation has changed
. How we can help girls of today deal with the realities of growing up in a world where sexual expression is valued but also problematic

The Body Project is a compelling historical argument that girls today are in crisis and a call "to think about how girls learn about their bodies and whose interest informs the presentation of this critical information." Told with humor and grace, Brumberg's story stimulates memories of every woman's struggle with pimples, menstruation, training bras and first kisses.

In addition to being a fellow of the Society of American Historians, Brumberg's has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and The MacDowell Colony. She received her B.A. from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in history from The University of Virginia. She is the grandmother of two teenage girls who live, as she does, in Ithaca, New York.