Business History

Elise Berggren researches the post-Holocaust restitution of homes and businesses in Norway, using a combination of methods and digital humanities. Examining the life-stories and post-1945 experiences of each of the 2000 Jewish Norwegians, she focuses on the larger human significance of restitution.

John Branch's dissertation examines the growing economic prominence of the U.S. nonprofit sector in the late twentieth century, with particular attention to labor and management at nonprofit organizations and the sector’s place in the history of political and economic thought.

Gijs Dreijer is writing a book about the crucial role Dutch entrepreneurs played in the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. The research demonstrates the trans-national nature of investments across European colonial empires.

Xiaoyu Gao's scholarship seeks to deepen the understanding of East Asia’s historical evolution and the wider implications of globalization and capitalism during a critical era of global economic expansion and integration.

Yuan Jia-Zheng is currently writing a monograph on multinational investment and technology transfer to China’s automobile industry between the 1950s and the 2020s. The book explores how Chinese companies became market leaders in electric vehicles.

Yongdo Kim is working on two research projects relating to U.S. business history, one on the career paths of executive officers in the large U.S. enterprises in the twentieth century, and another on the history of the U.S. tire industry.

Ellen Nye is currently working on a book project entitled, Empires of Obligation: Early Modern Monetary Governance between the English and Ottoman Empires, examines the relationship between global credit networks and domestic public finance in early modern England and the Ottoman Empire to revise nationally bound narratives about financial revolution, state formation, and capitalism.

Giacomo Rosini's research compares how barriers to entry were strategically created in the Italian and American movie industry in the 1920s and 1930s taking into consideration the different political and societal settings in the two countries.

Abram Smith investigates the organization, regulation and governance of the processing industries that prepared Egyptian cotton for export from 1905 to 1952. Their roles in marketing, standardizing and disseminating new cotton varieties helped coordinate Egypt's production with changing global markets.