Historian Devin Kennedy

Biography

Devin Kennedy is Assistant Professor of History and the Evelyn and Herbert Howe Bascom Professor of Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A historian of science by training, his research focuses on the history of computer science and digital technology in the United States. Kennedy is a faculty member in History and the Program in the History of Science, Technology & Medicine at UW-Madison, as well as the undergraduate ILS program.

Kennedy received my AB in Comparative Literature from Princeton and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard. Before UW-Madison, he was the Helen and Robert Appel Fellow in History and Technology at the at the New-York Historical Society. A current CV is here.

A picture of Devin

Current Research Areas

20th Century United States history
History of digital technology and computer science
Business history, the history of capitalism, & financial markets

Book: Coding Capital: Computing in the Postwar US Economy

(Columbia University Press Studies in the History of US Capitalism)

Coding Capital: Computing in the Postwar US Economy situates the history of computer science within developments in the US economy, tracing how the manufacturing and financial industries molded technology and scientific research towards their needs, and how in turn, computing supported the emergence of a financialized economy. The book covers a forty-year period spanning between the earliest discussions of computers as tools to solve the dilemmas of the postwar industrial firm, through the computer-accelerated collapse of the US stock market on Black Monday 1987.

Works in Progress

Aspects of the history of academic computer science, including a history of computational complexity theory, and a study of concepts of time in computer design.
"Silent Partners: Indirect Investment and Financialization in the United States, 1950-1975" (Forthcoming, Journal of American History) Preprint Here
- This article explores how, in the second half of the 20th century, Americans came to be owners of companies they did not know, and entangled in financial activities beyond their control. Specifically, the article examines the rise of institutional investing in stock by pension funds, insurance companies, universities and other third-parties, and their influence on American finance and capitalism more broadly.
An article on the "Social Vulnerability" Debate within Computer Science in the 1980s, and more broadly on notions of responsibility in the computer professions. Supported by the Association of Computing Machinery History Committee

Graduate Training & Recruitment

I teach in the History and History of Science, Medicine and Technology Programs at UW-Madison. I am especially interested in working with graduate students in these programs and in other fields working on topics related to the history of computer technology and computer science, 20th century economic, institutional and labor history, as well as the history of technology and science broadly. I emphasize a combination of approaches drawing from media studies, STS, business and economic history. I have advised students in prelim qualifying fields in:

History of Technology in the 19th-20th century US
History of Information Technologies, Data Practices & Data Sciences

2024-25 Courses

Fall: History of Science 150: The Digital Age
Fall: History of Science 720: Historiography & Methods
Spring: History of Science 921: Transnational Seminar on the Atomic Age (with Louise Young)

Regularly Offered Courses

History of Science 150: The Digital Age
History of Science/Integrated Liberal Studies 202: The Making of Modern Science

Previous Courses

History of Science 350: Science and Technology in the Global Cold War
History 201: The Historians Craft: Histories of Data and Data Science
History of Science 907: Technology, Democracy and Power