Rebecca L. Spang, National Fellow, researches, writes, and teaches about money, revolutions, consumption, and politics from 1750 to today. A Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University, she is the author of two prize-winning books: The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (2020) and Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (2015) both published by Harvard University Press. Her co-authored article, “Individuals, Institutions, and Innovation in the Debates of the French Revolution” (2018) won a Cozzarelli Prize from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Spang regularly reviews books about money, food, and the French Revolution for the Times Literary Supplement and has also written for the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times. She is currently working on The Money of the Poor, a book which will tell the social, cultural, and political history of monetary multiplicity and its effects on ordinary people.
Selected Work
- The Revolution Is Under Way Already: An article for the Atlantic about living through revolutionary times and why calling what we are living through "a revolution" is to claim it for human action.
- The U.S. Is Politically Bankrupt: A piece for the Atlantic on how elites in the U.S. today are using debates about debt and taxes to further their own political ends and weaken the public good.
- What the French Revolution Teacher Us About the Dangers of Gerrymandering: An article for the Washington Post on the danger of notionally representative institutions that prove to be anything but.
- China and the Money Question: A review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books showing how the history of money is also the history of racism and geopolitics.