Jessica Hamel-Akré is a historian of ideas, culture, and women’s health. A postdoctoral fellow in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and member of Newnham College, she specializes in the history of women’s appetite control, the rise of diet culture and the medicalization of eating disorders in eighteenth century Britain. Likewise, she is an expert in women’s writing and feminist thought. In 2018, Jessica earned a Ph.D in English Literature at the Université de Montréal and beforehand, a MA in Literary and Feminist Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She was a visiting research fellow at the University of Sydney in 2016. Her work has been supported by numerous prestigious individual research grants, in particular by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jessica co-created a BBC Radio 4 documentary based on her work, “The Unexpected History of Clean Eating,” aired in 2019, and spoke on the history of women’s body image at the renowned Montreal feminist film festival Les Filministes. Jessica is currently writing her first book of narrative non-fiction.
