Rate My Professor Ann La Berge

Ann La Berge served as associate professor of science and technology studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, joining the faculty in 1981 and receiving emerita status from the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors in 2014. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College, two master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. La Berge taught history of science and medicine and focused her research on nineteenth-century French public health and medicine, along with the history of French medical microscopy. Her publications include one monograph, two co-edited volumes, many articles, and book chapters on French medicine and public health. Among her key works are the monograph Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1992), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Mordechai Feingold (Rodopi, 1994), and Constructing Paris Medicine, co-edited with Caroline Hannaway (Rodopi, 1999). These contributions have advanced scholarly understanding of French medical history.

Since 2006, La Berge researched obesity in the United States with an emphasis on diet, producing an award-winning article, “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America,” published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences in 2008, as well as an article and chapter on the rise and fall of calorie counting as a weight-loss strategy. She further enriched the discipline of science and technology studies by frequently organizing conferences and reviewing manuscripts for national and international journals and funding agencies. Through her teaching, research, and service, La Berge has exerted considerable influence on the history of medicine and related fields.