Sophia Parvizi Wayne

Bio

Sophia Parvizi Wayne is a History Major with a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Policy Journalism and Media born and raised in London, England. During her time at Duke, she has run for the Varsity Track and Field team, started her own female empowerment running club and continued to work on mental health advocacy. Her passion in journalism, which has seen her as Creative editor of Duke’s biggest online magazine The Standard, but also freelance writing for the Huffington Post, Women’s Health Magazine, Forbes and Buzzfeed among others, combined with her passion for reclaiming personal history, has led to her founding an artificial intelligence publishing company Trado, that aims to hold onto stories that shouldn’t be lost. She will continue to work and build the company next year. Her idea for her thesis began many years ago, following recovery from Anorexia Nervosa and working with the UK government on mental health education because regardless of the science and the progress made in education, she wanted to understand how eating disorders came to be what they are today in the first place.

Thesis

See full thesis: The Transformation of Anorexia in 19^th Century Britain: Victorian womanhood and cultures of the body

Faculty Advisor: Jehangir Malegam

Thesis Abstract

Through the analysis of consumer culture, food practises and changing class structures in nineteenth century Britain, this paper argues that the Victorian period was a turning point for the development of Anorexia Nervosa. It has a particular focus on the middle class during the period but also on women because both then and now these groups continue to be the majority of those that succumb to the disease. Tracing its history from holy women and Anorexia Mirabilis during the 1200s and 1300s up until Victorian middle class women in the late 1800s, whilst additionally drawing upon the history of the medicalisation of a number of diseases, this thesis highlights that Anorexia in all its forms was a mechanism of self-control but also in part an aspirational medium for women. The paper does not go into the psychological components of the disease and does not suggest that these are not foundational in the development of the disease too.

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