Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Joan Brumberg

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Ithaca, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1994, 1994, 2002

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is an American social historian and writes and lectures in the fields of women's history and medical history. Her first appointment at Cornell University (1979) was in Women's Studies and Human Development. From that point, her research, teaching, and writing have been interdisciplinary and focused on gender. She is a Professor Emerita of Cornell University, and lectures and writes about the experiences of adolescents through history until the present day. In the subject area of gender studies, she has written about boys and violence, and girls and body image. Her 1987 book, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as A Modern Disease won four major disciplinary awards: the Berkshire Book Prize (in women's history), the John Hope Franklin Prize (in American Studies), the Eileen Basker Prize (in medical anthropology), and the Watson Davis Prize (in history of science writing). Book Riot included it as one of the 100 best books in the history of medicine. The Body Project: A History of American Girls (1997) was based on diaries written by adolescents from the pre-Civil War Era until 1980s. Although the author admired certain Victorian protections for girls, she also urged a new code of sexual ethics for a post virginal age. The book received special recognition from Voice of Youth Advocates. Brumberg has also worked collaboratively with photographer Lauren Greenfield on Girl Culture (2002) and Thin (2006). In light of the contemporary debates over the juvenile death penalty, she wrote Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer (2004), which explored the case of an immigrant adolescent murderer who was hanged in Cheyenne, WY in 1898. Her work was used in arguments against the juvenile death penalty. Her first book, Mission for Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture (1978) won Honorable Mention from The Society of Church History. Brumberg is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and also has awards from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was twice a fellow at MacDowell and is a fellow of the Society for American Historians. Brumberg was named a Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor, an award given for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Studios

Schelling

Joan Brumberg worked in the Schelling studio.

Marian MacDowell funded construction of this studio the year that the organization was established and the first artists arrived for residency. It was called Bark Studio until 1933, when it was renamed in honor of Ernest Schelling, a composer, pianist, and orchestral leader who served as president of what was then called the Edward MacDowell…

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