Cuff, Robert Dennis 1941-2001

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CUFF, Robert Dennis 1941-2001

PERSONAL: Born May 2, 1941, in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada; died of an apparent stroke November 25, 2001, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; married; wife's name Mary Lou (died 1999); children: Christine, Katherine, Peter. Education: University of Toronto, B.A., 1963; Princeton University, M.A., Ph.D.

CAREER: York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, faculty member, 1969-2001, became full professor, 1978. Taught at Princeton University and University of Rochester; visiting professor, Harvard Business School.

AWARDS, HONORS: Newcomen Award, 1970; Charles Warren Center, Harvard Business School visiting fellow, 1973-74.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with J. L. Granatstein) War and Society inNorth America, T. Nelson (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1971.

The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1973.

(Editor, with Glenn Porter) Enterprise and NationalDevelopment: Essays in Canadian Business and Economic History, Hakkert (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.

(With J. L. Granatstein) Canadian-American Relations in Wartime: From the Great War to the Cold War, Hakkert (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1975.

(With J. L. Granatstein) American Dollars, CanadianProsperity: Canadian-American Economic Relations, 1945-1950, Samuel-Stevens (Sarasota, FL), 1978.

SIDELIGHTS: Robert Dennis Cuff, an historian at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, made significant contributions to scholarship about the relationship between business and government in twentieth-century America. His The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I was considered a landmark study and, according to a writer in the Organization of American Historians Newsletter, "still remains the standard work on the subject." Though Cuff specialized in business-government relations in the United States, he also examined U.S.-Canadian relations, collaborating with J. L. Granatstein on such works as Canadian-American Relations in Wartime: From the Great War to the Cold War, War and Society in North America, and American Dollars, Canadian Prosperity: Canadian-American Economic Relations, 1945-1950.

During the 1980s, Cuff became increasingly interested in business education. He studied the development of production control systems, a subject that he was invited to teach during two stints as a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School. As his interests continued to evolve, Cuff eventually shifted his specialty to the history of management. When he returned to York University after his Harvard appointment, he developed interdisciplinary courses that brought historical context to the study of management. Cuff was planning a new research project on the management of World War II mobilization when he died suddenly, of an apparent stroke, in 2001.