Sam H. Franz

Sam Franz researches the history of capitalism and computing in the twentieth-century United States. His 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, Sam's research makes the past and present stakes of the problematic notion of "knowledge economies" tangible.

His previous work explored the history of complex adaptive systems research and the complexity sciences, now centrally associated with the Santa Fe Institute.

Sam is currently the Assistant Editor of the History of Science Society Newsletter. He is also the organizer of “Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge,” a workshop and working group interested in defining and developing materialist approaches to the history of science, technology, and knowledge.

Sam’s work has been supported by the Tomash Fellowship at the Charles Babbage Institute, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Linda Hall Library, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Bordin/Gillette Fellowship at the Bentley Historical Library, the Hagley Library, and multiple grants and fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania.