Rebecca L. Spang

Rebecca Spang knows about money, revolutions, and restaurants and has written prize-winning books about all three. Her The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture was widely reviewed (New Yorker, LRB, World Commodity Report, Radical Philosophy, etc.) and has been translated into Japanese, Turkish, Greek, and Portuguese; her Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (2015) was a Financial Times “Book of the Year” and won the Gottschalk Prize. She also co-authored a paper using topic modeling to answer the question “How surprising was the French Revolution?”; published in PNAS, it was awarded a 2019 Cozzarelli Prize. Spang will devote her Guggenheim year to “the money of the poor”: a book telling the social, cultural, and political history of monetary multiplicity and its effects on ordinary people.

Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University, Spang previously taught at University College London and has held visiting appointments at Yale SOM’s International Center for Finance and the University of Tübingen. She reviews regularly for the TLS and writes for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the FT, and the LARB. Spang studied at Cornell and Harvard and was a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows.