About kfitz

I'm Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and I'm currently Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. I've been at MSU since August 2017, and up until July 2024 I served as Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English. During that same time period, I was founding director of Mesh Research, a lab dedicated to developing open-source, interoperable, academy-owned tools for the future of scholarly communication. I've handed off directing the lab to a colleague of mine, though I'm still a member. Key among Mesh's projects is Knowledge Commons, an open-access network serving more than 40,000 scholars and practitioners across -- and beyond -- the disciplines and around the world.

Knowledge Commons, like much of my work across my career, is focused on facilitating resilient, sustainable scholarly communities and enabling their processes of communication to foreground connection, conversation, and collaboration. We launched Knowledge Commons -- then called Humanities Commons -- in late 2016, during my stint as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. The network built on lessons we'd learned from our prior work with MLA Commons, as well as from MediaCommons, a network for scholars and students in media studies, which I co-founded with Avi Santo and with enormous support from the Institute for the Future of the Book and the NYU Libraries.

Alongside this network-building work, I write. My newest book, Leading Generously: Tools for Transformation, will be published in October 2024. I've published three prior single-authored books -- Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Hopkins 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 Press, 2006) -- and was lead author on the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. I've also been blogging since 2002, originally at plannedobsolescence.net and more recently at kfitz.info.
 
Since January 2022, I've served as president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, and I was a member of the board of directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources from 2013 to 2023, and board chair from 2017 to 2019. I served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities from 2020 to 2022.