Rebecca Spang. Rebecca Spang, the Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, has been named a recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2022.

The author of “The Invention of the Restaurant” and “Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution,” Spang describes herself as “a critic of the obvious … a historian of that which appears to have no history.” During her Guggenheim Fellowship, she will work on her next book, “The Money of the Poor,” which is under contract with Harvard University Press. It will focus on the history of money across impoverished and marginalized communities, and how social difference is connected to monetary systems.

“Congratulations to Professor Spang, a truly distinct voice in her field of study, on this well-deserved honor,” Provost and Executive Vice President Rahul Shrivastav said. “This prestigious fellowship recognizes her exceptional scholarly work as a cultural historian on the politics, economics and consumption habits of 18th- and 19th-century Europeans and how they continue to provide insights into our modern systems and institutions of government.”

Shrivastav also thanked Spang for her campus leadership as director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as director of the Liberal Arts and Management Program and as a member of the Bloomington Faculty Council Executive Committee.

Since January 2017, Spang has served as director of LAMP, a nationally recognized program that allows undergraduates to combine the benefits of a liberal arts degree with core business competencies gained through the Kelley School of Business. She has been director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies since 2013, and served as faculty president in 2016-17 and secretary in 2014-15 and 2021-22.

Spang is the only two-time winner of the Gottschalk Prize, given for the best book in 18th-century studies, and the only IU faculty member other than Elinor Ostrom to win a Cozzarelli Prize for an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

She is one of 180 Guggenheim Fellows named this year out of almost 2,500 applicants.

Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors.

Bethany Nolan is senior communications consultant in the Office of the Vice President for Communications and Marketing.