The workshop will meet regularly on Fridays during term to discuss pre circulated papers. The papers will represent the cutting edge of scholarship at the interface between historically inflected work between the humanities and the social sciences. Each workshop will begin with the response from an affiliated graduate student to be followed by lively and free ranging discussion.
Light lunch served from 11:30-12:00PM
Rebecca Sprang is a Professor of History at Indiana University and Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Management. She is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe who has published primarily on the interaction of politics, culture, and consumption. In her most recent research, she has been especially interested in money. ‘Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution’ uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation—the assignats (a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”)—to write a new history of money and a new history of the French Revolution. It shows that revolutionary radicalization was driven by the ever-widening gap between political ideals and the experience of daily life and restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the Revolution (and hence of modern politics).