Henry Kaufman Fellowship Program

The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business received a $1 million endowment from the Henry & Elaine Kaufman Foundation to support a fellowship in business history, in affiliation with the school’s Center for Financial Policy. David Sicilia was appointed the first Henry Kaufman Fellow in Business History, effective July 1, 2010 through 2015.

David Sicilia is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research and teaching focus on the evolution of global and U.S. capitalism.

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-Driven 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 powerful Fed Chairman's public pronouncements on investor behavior. Professor Sicilia's co-edited books are Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, eds., Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004); and David B. Sicilia and Robert Sobel, eds., The United States Executive Branch: A Biographical Directory of Heads of State and Cabinet Officials (Greenwood Press, 2004).

David Sicilia has received grants and fellowships from the United States-Denmark Fulbright Commission; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 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, DR-1 Danish Public Television, and NHK Television Japan.

His current research projects focus on 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.