About

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she also directs MESH, a research and development unit focused on the future of scholarly communication. She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 30,000 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world, and she is author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Planned Obsolescence:  Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011), and The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, and she served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities from 2020 to 2022.

Find me on hcommons.social.

Education

PhD, English, New York University, 1998.
MFA, English, Louisiana State University, 1991.
BA, English, Louisiana State University, 1988.

Other Publications

Books
Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. NYU Press, 2011.
The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.

Selected Articles
“Digital Wallace: Networked Pedagogies and Distributed Reading.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace, eds. Stephen J. Burn and Mary K. Holland. MLA Publications, 2019. 94-100.
“Sustainability, Solidarity, and Community in Higher Education.” EDUCAUSE Review, 26 August 2019.
“Obsolescence and Innovation in the Age of the Digital.” The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers. Routledge, 2018. 329–35.
“Universities should be working for the greater good.” Times Higher Education, 11 April 2019.
“The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of Google.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 March 2016.
“Peer Review.” A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 439–48.
“Opening Up Open Access.” LSE Impact Blog, 21 October 2015.
“The Future History of the Book: Time, Attention, Convention.” Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, ed. Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 111–26.
“Scholarly Publishing in the Digital Age.” Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, MIT Press, 2015. 457–66.

Blog Posts

Projects

Humanities Commons, Project director. 2017-present.
MediaCommons, Co-founder and publisher, scholarly network in media studies. Spring 2007–present.

Memberships

President, Board of Directors, Educopia Institute.
Past President, Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Board of Directors, Council on Library and Information Resources.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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