2022-23 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Richard A. Bachmann is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the History Department and a fellow of the Science, Technology, and Society Graduate Certificate Program and the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program. His research focuses on the debates about the impact of “automation” in North America and Europe during the long sixties (1955-73). Richard seeks to deepen our understanding of how “automation” became a sociotechnical phenomenon and scientific field of study which raised serious questions about the significance of “work” in the social and political order of postwar racial capitalism.
Research Plans: Drawing on archival materials in U-M’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection and the Walter P. Reuther Library, Bachmann will investigate how members of the Correspondence Publishing Committee—a multiracial group of Detroit workers and labor activists—and industrial psychologists and sociologists from Michigan made sense of automation in Detroit and beyond.
