Sam Franz named as the 2025-2026 CBI Tomash Fellow

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/21/2025) — We are thrilled to announce that University of Pennsylvania ABD in the History and Sociology of Science Sam Franz is the incoming Erwin and Adelle Tomash Fellow for next academic year. Prior to entering the Penn HSS Doctoral Program, Franz earned his BA with honors from the University of Michigan where he majored in both History and German. He has published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, as well as in our own Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture.

Franz has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Association for Computing Machinery, Linda Hall Library, and others. He has presented his work at a host of impressive venues from Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan to the Society of the History of Technology and the History of Science Society.

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. 

The Tomash Fellowship is possible through the past generous support of CBI’s founders nearly a half century ago, Erwin and Adelle Tomash. A Tomash Fellowship has been awarded each year since the start of the CBI Tomash Fellowship in 1980.

Jeffrey R. Yost