Speaker biography | Rebecca L. Spang is a professor of history and director of the Liberal Arts + Management Program (LAMP) at Indiana University. Her first book, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, was recently republished in a special 20th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Adam Gopnik. The original edition won two major prizes and was translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, and Modern Greek. Spang has written about contemporary restaurant culture for The Atlantic, The Conversation, and The TLS (Times Literary Supplement). You can follow her on Twitter @RebeccaSpang.

Moderator biography | Carl Ipsen attended institutes of lower and higher learning in Berkeley, Calif. (Ph.D. 1992). He is a professor of history at Indiana University and works on modern Italy. He books include Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge 1996); Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era (Palgrave 2006); and Fumo: Italy’s Love Affair with the Cigarette (Stanford 2016). He is director of the IU Food Institute and is currently working on a history of olive oil. He spent a decade working in restaurants.