Next Steps
Six years ago, I had the privilege of joining the staff of the Modern Language Association as Director of Scholarly Communication. My goal was to help the association and its members explore how developing digital technologies and platforms might affect the ways they produce and share their research, the ways they communicate and collaborate with one another, and the ways that they get their work out to the world. My hope in this position was to be able to take the research I’d been doing, both on MediaCommons and in Planned Obsolescence, and put it to work in service to our fields.
This position was an extraordinary challenge, and it pushed me in ways that I never could have predicted. Over the last six years I had the opportunity to work with a brilliant acquisitions, editorial, and development team to rethink our publishing processes and produce a new MLA style for the network age. We rethought our author agreements to make them fully open-access friendly. And perhaps most importantly, we created new ways of fostering direct member-to-member communication on MLA Commons, and growing that project into the interdisciplinary, open, not-for-profit Humanities Commons. Along the way, I’ve had the honor of working with brilliant, dedicated colleagues, as well as with a terrific number of committed MLA members, all of whom have challenged and strengthened the ways I’ve thought about research, publishing, communication, and collaboration in all their forms.
Today, I’m on the cusp of a new transition: this August, I’ll be joining the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University as Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English. The decision to leave the MLA was a difficult one, but the opportunity to bring the many things that I’ve learned over the last six years back to a university campus, and particularly to an institution like MSU, was extremely enticing. I owe my undergraduate and masters-level education to a land-grant institution, and the mission of those institutions — their commitment not just to the university community but to building bridges between the academy and the broader public — matters enormously to me. I’m thrilled that I’ll be able to work with colleagues at MSU on building programs and projects that can serve the public good.
My role as Director of DH will be to facilitate and foster campus-wide collaborations among MSU’s extraordinary number of digital centers, programs, and projects, helping build on their strengths and imagine new future possibilities. I’m also looking forward to working directly with students once again, supporting graduate students in exploring new forms of scholarly communication and professionalization and working with undergraduates as they begin exploring and shaping the future of our increasingly digital culture. And of course I’m excited about the opportunity to push my research and writing projects forward — not least, Generous Thinking, which is entirely focused on the potential that the humanities present for recreating productive, collaborative relationships between the academy and the public sphere. And — best of all possible worlds — I’m thrilled that I’m going to be able to continue my work on Humanities Commons, working with the MLA’s fantastic team and our many partners to think about ways that the platform might support more new kinds of collaborations within and across university campuses.
It has been a genuine privilege to spend the last six years serving the field. I am grateful to have the chance now to continue that service, both to a local campus community and to the larger public good. Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement and critique and conversation over the years; I’m hopeful that I’ll have the opportunity in the coming years to build on the thoughtful, generous sense of community that I’ve found here.
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