More information on this Friday Lunch talk from Assistant Professor Devin Kennedy is coming soon.
Please note: A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.
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. He holds a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard and an AB from Princeton in Comparative Literature. Kennedy works across business and economic history, the histories of science and technology, and science and technology studies. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the New-York Historical Society.
His first book Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy (Columbia University Press, July 2026) offers a new account of computing since 1947, situating developments in computer science and technology in the context of US economic history. The book shows how computer science–often before it had that name–cut its teeth addressing problems among the manufacturing and financial industries that were early adopters of computer systems.
Kennedy is involved with multiple groups on campus studying artificial intelligence and its human dimensions. He is an Inaugural fellow of the Center for the Humanistic Study of Artificial Intelligence and Uncertainty. At the Center, Kennedy is working on several papers on the history of theoretical computer science including the history of computational complexity theory, the history of the universal approximation theorem, and on the relationship between mathematical intuitionism and computer science.