Faculty

Rowena Olegario
Assistant Professor of History

PhD, Harvard, 1998

History of business, credit, entrepreneurship, networks, and information; U.S. social and cultural history; global institutions and markets

Telephone: please use email for contact
Email: rowena.olegario@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2008-2009

Rowena Olegario is a historian of business interested in the intersection of market forces, institutional change, and culture.  She is the author of A Culture of Credit:  Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Harvard, 2006), which traces the history of credit reporting – and, more broadly, the ideas about business and financial transparency -- in the United States.  She is co-author (with Davis Dyer and Frederick Dalzell) of Rising Tide:  165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), a commissioned history that has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Thai.  Her current book project takes the story of credit reporting into the twentieth century, when the institution spread from the U.S., the U.K, Germany, and other industrialized countries to Latin America, eastern Europe, and Asia.  

Professor Olegario was awarded the 1999 Newcomen-Harvard Special Award in Business History for her article on Jewish merchants and the problem of transparency, published in the Business History Review.   In 1999-2001 she participated in research conducted by the World Bank on institutions and markets and contributed a chapter to Credit Reporting Systems and the International Economy (MIT Press, 2003).  She appeared in the PBS production They Made America (2005) as an authority on the Mercantile Agency, the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet.  Professor Olegario remains interested in the role of international institutions in global commerce.  She was recently named a fellow of “The Next Generation Project:  U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions,” sponsored by the American Assembly (affiliated with Columbia University).  

In addition to teaching courses on American and international business history, Professor Olegario offers courses in a number of American history topics, including the Revolution and the Civil War.  Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, she was Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow of the Society of Scholars at the University of Michigan Business School.  Her non-academic experience includes working as a senior market analyst for Coopers & Lybrand (now part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers) in New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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