About
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. She is author of three books, including
Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011), and she was lead author of the eighth edition of the
MLA Handbook (MLA, 2016). She serves as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, as well as president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute. She is project director of
Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving nearly 30,000 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.
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.
Projects
Humanities Commons, Project director. 2017-present.
MediaCommons, Co-founder and publisher, scholarly network in media studies. Spring 2007–present.
