Kenneth Lipartito received is PhD in history from the Johns Hopkins University and has held academic positions at Middlebury College, Rice University, and the University of Houston.  A specialist in business and economic history and the history of technology, in 1991 he was Newcomen Fellow and in 2009 the Thomas McCraw Fellow at Harvard Business School. His scholarship has received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Hagley Museum and Library. In 2000 he received the Harold Williamson Prize from the Business History Conference.  From 2003-2007 he was editor of Enterprise and Society: the International Journal of Business History.  He currently serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

Lipartito is the author or editor of six books:  The Bell System and Regional Business: the Telephone in the South (Johns Hopkins, 1989); Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston (University of Texas, 1991), which received the T. H. Fehrenbach Award in Texas History; Constructing Corporate America (Oxford, 2004); Investing for Middle America: John Elliott Tappan and the Origins of American Express Financial Advisors (St. Martins, 2001); A History of the Kennedy Space Center (University Press of Florida, 2007), winner of the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Prize.  In 2012 he co-authored Corporate Responsibility:  The American Experience (Cambridge University Press), which received the American Academy of Management, Social Issues in Management Book Prize.  He has also published fifteen scholarly articles in a wide range of journals, including the American Historical Review, Technology and Culture, Enterprise & Society, and the Business History Review.  Several of his articles have been recognized with distinguished awards, including the Newcomen Award from the Business History Conference and the Abbott Payton Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

Over the course of his career he has given fifty-four papers and invited talks at a wide range of venues.  In 2002 he gave the Alfred D. Chandler Lecture at the University of North Carolina and he has lectured at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, the Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics, The New School for Social Research the Kennedy School of Government, and elsewhere.  He has presented his work in Tokyo, Milan, Paris, Lisbon, and Mexico City.