About the Initiative

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, and Faculty Chair of the School's Business History Initiative. He holds degrees of BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, UK. He researches the evolution, impact and responsibility of global business. He has published on the history of global business, specializing both in consumer products, including beauty and fashion, and services such as banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. He has written extensively on the business history of emerging markets, especially in Latin America, South Asia and Turkey, and launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets oral history project at the Harvard Business School. Professor Jones developed and teaches the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course, which explores the role of entrepreneurship in the globalization cycles of the last two hundred years, in the second year of the MBA program. Professor Jones's books include, most recently, Beauty Imagined (2010), Profits and Sustainability: A Global History of Green Entrepreneurship (2017), and Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (2023). For more, see his faculty profile.

Walter A. Friedman is Director of the Business History Initiative and Lecturer. He edits Business History Review with Geoff Jones. He specializes in business, labor, and economic history. He is author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (2004), Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters (2013), and American Business History: A Very Short Introduction (2020). In 2017, he was president of the Business History Conference. For more, see his faculty profile.

David Shorten is the manager of the Business History Initiative and the production manager of Business History Review. He holds a PhD in History from Boston University, where he served as a lecturer before joining Harvard Business School. He is currently writing a history of U.S. financiers abroad, showing how sovereign debt contracts reshaped diplomatic protection and debates over foreign intervention in the early twentieth century.

Molly Keane serves as the Coordinator of the Business History Initiative. She graduated from Emmanuel College, MA, with a B.A. in History and double minors in Communications and Migration Studies. Previously, she worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Technology Licensing Office.

Gerben Bakker specializes in the long-run analysis of innovation, especially in the creative industries. He has completed award-winning research programs on the history of the live entertainment, motion picture, and music industries, and on the trade in news. Currently he is completing research on the business and economic history of the American motion picture industry since 1945, and he is beginning a new research project on the history of multinationals in the creative industries. His latest publication is “The Terminal Revolution: Reuters and Bloomberg as Global Providers of Financial and Economic News, c. 1960 – 2019,” in Pedro Aguiar and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, eds., The Routledge Handbook of News Agencies (2025).

Adam Hefetz is a historian specializing in Zionism and capitalism, approached through the lens of business history. He earned his Ph.D. in Jewish History from the University of Haifa. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book titled Financing Zionism: The Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Origins of Israeli Capitalism. His second major research project, tentatively titled Profiting from Petroleum: A Global History of Israel’s Oil Companies, explores the integration of Israel’s oil sector into the global fossil fuel economy. Hefetz’s recent publications examine diverse aspects of economic and political history, including the financing strategies of Zionist institutions, the regulation of Palestine’s banking sector, and the intersections of accounting, imperialism, and capitalism in Mandate Palestine.

Christina Lubinski earned her Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen and was the Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School in 2010. She works across business history and entrepreneurship studies, using historical and humanistic approaches to explore how entrepreneurship shapes and is shaped by society. While here at HBS, she will draw on Baker Library archives to study the Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, a pioneering postwar research group that grappled with the social and economic role of entrepreneurship, debates that remain central to the field today. Her most recent publications include “Entrepreneurialism: Conceptual Exploration of an Ideology” (Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 2025), using historical approaches to understand the pervasiveness of entrepreneurship discourse on society. The paperback edition of her book Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise was just released by Cambridge University Press, reflecting her ongoing interest in the intersections of entrepreneurship, history, and society.