2026 Tomash Fellow Lecture with Sam Franz

Registration closes at 12 CST on Monday, March 9, 2026

Join CBI's 2025-2026 Tomash Fellow Sam Franz Doctoral Candidate, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, presenting his paper Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990.

This virtual event is free and open to the public.

Title: Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990

Abstract: This talk presents my dissertation, Calculating Knowledge, which argues that between 1945 and 1990 U.S. universities made industrial the production of scientific knowledge by embedding computing as both a managerial technology and an intellectual practice. Focusing on the central institution of the computing center, I show how these technologies and their institutional formations reorganized research, teaching, and administration around the practical and intellectual problems that confronted their operation. In the process, universities became key sites where the automation of intellectual labor in the form of computing machinery and emerging ideas about the “knowledge economy” converged. Drawing on archival research across public and private institutions, I show how computing centers and eventually computer science departments reshaped academic labor and redefined the university as an engine of economic growth. By placing the university itself at the center of the history of computing, the project reframes postwar transformations in work, capitalism, and higher education and offers a longer history for contemporary debates about AI and intellectual labor.

About Sam Franz

Sam Franz is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and holds the Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology from the Charles Babbage Institute. His research has also been supported by 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 awards from the University of Pennsylvania.

He is Managing Editor of the History of Science Society Newsletter and organizes Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge, a workshop and working group exploring materialist perspectives on science, technology, and knowledge. His earlier work examined the rise of complex adaptive systems research and the complexity sciences, now centrally associated with the Santa Fe Institute.

2026 Tomash Fellow Lecture with Sam Franz

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