Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and professor of human development and women's studies at Cornell University, has been elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Fellows are elected "in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction" of their historical work. Brumberg was one of seven fellows elected this year. The society has a limit of 250 fellows.

A social and cultural historian, Brumberg teaches courses on the social history of American women, on the family and on childhood and adolescence.

She also is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Award for University Teachers and a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship.

Brumberg's first book, Mission for Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Her second book, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, won the Berkshire Book Prize, John Hope Franklin Prize, Watson Davis Prize and Eileen Basker Memorial Prize as the "best book," given, respectively, by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, American Studies Association, History of Science Society and Society of Medical Anthropology.

Her most recent book is The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997), which explores the changing historical experience of girls and their bodies as described in more than 100 diaries written since the 1830s. It was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection.

Brumberg received her B.A. (1965) in history from the University of Rochester, her master's (1971) in American studies from Boston College and her Ph.D. (1978) in American history from the University of Virginia.