SAM H FRANZ
Doctoral Candidate
History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
I am a historian of computing, capitalism, and the modern university. My dissertation project, tentatively titled "Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990," explores knowledge production's increasing centrality in US capitalism by tracing the institutionalization of computing infrastructure and education in US universities. In the second half of the twentieth century, advocates of computing education and infrastructure—including federal officials, academics, university administrators, and corporate managers—saw such technologies as both demanding and serving broader transformations in the US economy. Seemingly local or technical debates about the role of computing on university campuses concealed contentious claims about the emerging postindustrial workplace and enacted them concretely. By analyzing aspirational and real transformations in universities and the workplaces for which their students were destined, my research makes the past and present stakes of the problematic notion of "knowledge economies" tangible.
My previous work explored the history of complex adaptive systems research and the complexity sciences, now centrally associated with the Santa Fe Institute.
I am currently the Assistant Editor of the History of Science Society Newsletter. I am also the organizer of “Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge,” a workshop and working group interested in defining and forwarding materialist approaches to the history of science, technology, and knowledge.
samfranz@sas.upenn.edu
Doctoral Candidate
History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
I am a historian of computing, capitalism, and the modern university. My dissertation project, tentatively titled "Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990," explores knowledge production's increasing centrality in US capitalism by tracing the institutionalization of computing infrastructure and education in US universities. In the second half of the twentieth century, advocates of computing education and infrastructure—including federal officials, academics, university administrators, and corporate managers—saw such technologies as both demanding and serving broader transformations in the US economy. Seemingly local or technical debates about the role of computing on university campuses concealed contentious claims about the emerging postindustrial workplace and enacted them concretely. By analyzing aspirational and real transformations in universities and the workplaces for which their students were destined, my research makes the past and present stakes of the problematic notion of "knowledge economies" tangible.
My previous work explored the history of complex adaptive systems research and the complexity sciences, now centrally associated with the Santa Fe Institute.
I am currently the Assistant Editor of the History of Science Society Newsletter. I am also the organizer of “Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge,” a workshop and working group interested in defining and forwarding materialist approaches to the history of science, technology, and knowledge.
samfranz@sas.upenn.edu