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David B. Sicilia, Department of History

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Professional Biography

David B. Sicilia is Associate Professor and Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History; and Henry Kaufman Fellow in Business History, Center for Financial Policy, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park. His research and teaching focus on the evolution of U.S. and global capitalism.  His current research projects investigate the evolution of U.S credit rating since the 1950s; East-West technology transfer in the nineteenth century; and strategic change in the U.S. public relations industry since 1945.

Professor Sicilia's first book -- The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure, with Robert Sobel (Houghton-Mifflin, 1986) -- tells the stories of three dozen leading U.S. entrepreneurs across a range of industries. The two in-depth corporate histories that he published with Harvard Business School Press -- Labors of a Modern Hercules: The Evolution of a Chemical Company (1990), with Davis Dyer; and The Engine That Could: Seventy Five Years of Values-Drives Change at Cummins Engine Company (1997), with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank -- explore the inner workings of two technology intensive multinationals and the broader trends they exemplified in postwar business. In The Greenspan Effect: Words that Move the World's Markets (McGraw-Hill, 2000) -- voted a Library Journal Best Business Book of the Year -- Sicilia and Cruikshank dissect the influence of the former powerful Fed Chairman's public pronouncements on investor behavior.

Professor Sicilia's co-edited volumes are Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, eds., Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004) -- which explores social, cultural, and political dimensions of nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. corporations -- and Robert Sobel and David B. Sicilia, eds., The United States Executive Branch: A Biographical Directory of Heads of State and Cabinet Officials (Greenwood Press, 2003). 

David Sicilia has received grants and fellowships from the Danish-American Fulbright Commission, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the Shibusawa Ei'ichi Memorial Foundation of Japan, among others.  Since 1980 he has consulted -- independently and through The Cruikshank Company, Inc. and The Winthrop Group, Inc. -- for a variety of private and public institutions that seek to apply historical analysis to contemporary issues. Consulted frequently by local, national, and international print and broadcast media, Professor Sicilia has appeared on CNBC, CNN Financial News, Bloomberg Financial Television, National Public Radio, TV-1 in France, DR-1 Danish Public Television, and NHK Television Japan.

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