LARRY FROHMAN
Associate Professor (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1992)
Curriculum vitae
Office: SBS N-315
Email: lawrence.frohman@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Modern Europe, surveillance studies and the information society, welfare
and social policy, intellectual history
Surveillance and privacy are two of the primary concepts through which we seek to
make sense of modernity and of a world in which virtually all forms of social interaction
are now digitally mediated. They have already become—and are certain to remain—two
of the most contentious policy issues of our age. I have recently published The Politics of Personal Information. Surveillance, Privacy and Power in West Germany (Berghahn, 2020). In this book I explore the role of personal information in the
governance of modern societies, the forms of social power generated by the computerized
processing of this information, and the changing meaning of privacy in the information
society. I have also published related essays on the history of population registration,
the misfortunes of the German plan for a national database system, and impact of electronic
data processing on the meaning of medical confidentiality. My first book, Poor Relief and Welfare in Germany from the Reformation to World War I (Cambridge, 2008) showed how the preventive social welfare programs that emerged
at the turn of the century—and the Progressive conception of social citizenship they
embodied—served as a bridge between deterrent poor relief and the postwar welfare
state. I began my academic career as an intellectual historian of modern Europe with
a dissertation on the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey.
SELECT WORKS
• "'Only Sheep Let Themselves Be Counted': Privacy, Political Culture, and the 1983–87
West German Census Boycotts"
• Network Euphoria, Super-Information Systems and the West German Plan for a National
Database System