Distinguished Professor of History, Indiana University (c.v.)

Dean (Interim), Hutton Honors College

Guggenheim Fellow, 2022-2023

2023 National Fellow, New America

Spring-Summer 2024:

• Planet Money "Summer School: Economic History" episodes on "money" and "labor"--airing in August. 

• "Whose Problem was Small Change?" Economic History Workshop, Princeton University (February 28, 2024).

Upcoming:

• Cundhill History Prize Forum and Gala (Jury member), McGill University, October 2024.

• American University in Paris seminar and public talk, March 2025.

• Michigan Society of Fellows Anniversary Celebration, November 2025.

• "Money, Manhood, and Revolutionary Biography: The Limits of Voluntary Self-Fashioning," co-authored with Thomas Dodman, forthcoming in David A. Bell and Colin Jones, eds., French Revolutionary Lives. 

Recent Publications:

• "How We Learned to Love 'Free' Markets" (review essay), LARB 

• Review of Akinobu Kuroda, A Global History of Money in International Review of Social History (Dec. 2022); pdf here.

• "China and the Money Question" (review essay), LARB

• "How Money Works And What it Means" (review essay), The TLS (July 2021), pdf here

• "The Truth About Booms, Busts,  and Bubbles" (review essay), TLS

Most Read:

• "The Revolution is Under Way Already," The Atlantic (April 2020)

• "What a Revolution Looks Like," The Atlantic (July 4, 2020)

• (with Simon DeDeo) "How Surprising is the French Revolution? Insights and Information Theory" The Workshop 6 (2019)

I can also be found on BlueSky and on LinkedIn.

The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard University Press, 2000; new ed. 2020)  explains how "eating out" became an enjoyable leisure activity. It begins in the 1760s, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a thing to eat: a quasi-medicinal bouillon essential to eighteenth-century "nouvelle cuisine." From restoratives to Restoration, the book establishes the restaurant as the first public place where people went to be private. When many indoor dining rooms closed at the beginning of the  COVID-19 pandemic, we were reminded that restaurants have always been about sharing space with strangers. The food was an excuse. Winner of the  Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press and of ASEC's Gottschalk Prize, Invention of the Restaurant was reviewed in venues ranging from Radical Philosophy and Playboy to the New York Times and World Commodity Report. [more]

Sighted and Cited In:
Interview with Kayte Young for Earth Eats (50 minutes), here.

Video of presentation at Alliance Française de Chicago with Rick Shepro (February 2020); please try to ignore my crazy hair!

Anya von Bremzen, National Dish: Around the World in Search of  Food, History, and the Meaning of Home (Penguin, 2023).

Yasmin Tayag, "Outdoor Dining is Doomed," The Atlantic (January 31, 2023), here.

Sarah Holder, "Did the Pandemic Kill Restaurant Menus?" Bloomberg City Lab (June 18, 2021). 

Aaron Timms, "Salt, Fat, Acid, Defeat: The Restaurant Before-After Covid," n + 1 Magazine (Dec. 31, 2020), here. 

Amanda Michiko Shigihara, "Postmodern Life, Restaurants, and COVID-19," Contexts: Sociology for the Public 19:4 (Nov. 2020), here.
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Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015) offers a new history of money and a new history of the French Revolution. It shows money to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions and argues that revolutionary radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. The book restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the center of the Revolution and hence to that of modern politics. Winner of the Gottschalk Prize awarded by ASECS, it was also named one of the best history books of 2015 by the Financial Times; an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice; and Diane Coyle's Enlightened Economist "Book of the Year." [more]

Sighted and cited in:

Mischa Suter, Geld an der Grenze: Souveränität und Wertmaßstäbe im Zeitalter des Imperialismus 1871-1923 (Matthes und Seitz, 2024).

David Andress, "A qui faire confiance? Corps électoral et choix émotionnels sous l'Assemblée Nationale," AHRF 415 (2024).

John D'Amico, "The Making of Paper Money in Early Modern Japan," Economic History Review (2023).

Erika Vause, “State of Nature: Risk, Responsibility, and Moral Economies of Agricultural Insurance in 19th-Century France,” Agricultural History  97:3 (2023).

Louis Hyman, “Good Debtor, Good Worker: Wage Garnishment in the Rise of Consumer Credit,” Modern American History (2023).

Kevin Butcher, “Circuits of Exchange: Palmyrene Coins and Roman Monetary Plurality,” Studies in Palmyrene Archaeology and History 8 (2023).

Jérôme Blanc and Ludovic Desmedt, “De la pierre philosophale aux moulins à papier: d’alchimie monétaire dans L’Europe moderne,” Cahiers d’Economie Politique (2022).

Elizabeth A. Bond, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment France (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Brian Gettler, Colonialism's Currency: Money, State and First Nations in Canada (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020). 

Finn Brunton, Digital Cash (Princeton, 2019).

Leor Halevi, Modern Things on Trial: Islam's Global and Material Transformation (Columbia, 2019).

Anne Fleming, "Legal History as Economic History," Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford, 2018).