SAM H FRANZ
Doctoral Candidate
History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
I am presently in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. I also hold the Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology from the Charles Babbage Institute.
I study twentieth-century computing, capitalism, and education in the United States.
My dissertation project, Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990, examines how universities became laboratories for reimagining the role of knowledge in capitalism. In the decades after World War II, computing technologies were framed as tools that could both transform and destabilize intellectual and scientific labor, especially through automation. Federal officials, academics, administrators, and corporate managers promoted computing education and infrastructure as drivers of economic growth, while seemingly technical choices about curricula or mainframe access carried wider implications for the future of work in a “postindustrial” society. By tracing the promises and realities of computing education, Calculating Knowledge situates today’s debates about artificial intelligence and knowledge economies within a longer history of the entanglement of technology, labor, and the university.
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 the Managing 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 presently in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. I also hold the Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology from the Charles Babbage Institute.
I study twentieth-century computing, capitalism, and education in the United States.
My dissertation project, Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990, examines how universities became laboratories for reimagining the role of knowledge in capitalism. In the decades after World War II, computing technologies were framed as tools that could both transform and destabilize intellectual and scientific labor, especially through automation. Federal officials, academics, administrators, and corporate managers promoted computing education and infrastructure as drivers of economic growth, while seemingly technical choices about curricula or mainframe access carried wider implications for the future of work in a “postindustrial” society. By tracing the promises and realities of computing education, Calculating Knowledge situates today’s debates about artificial intelligence and knowledge economies within a longer history of the entanglement of technology, labor, and the university.
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 the Managing 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