Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Biography

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role, she was Director of DH@MSU and founding director of Mesh Research, a lab focused on the future of digital scholarly communication. Her work across her career has focused on building resilient, sustainable scholarly communities and transforming their processes of communication to foreground connection, conversation, and collaboration.

Her latest book, Leading Generously: Tools for Transformation, was published by Hopkins Press in Fall 2024. She is author of three previous 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). She is project director of Knowledge Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving nearly 50,000 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world. Between 2011 and 2017, Fitzpatrick was Director of Scholarly Communication and then Associate Executive Director of the Modern Language Association, where she co-authored and oversaw the development of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. Prior to taking on that position, she was Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, where she had been a member of the faculty since 1998. While at Pomona, she co-founded the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, where she led a number of experiments in open peer review and other innovations in scholarly publishing. She is president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, and a past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities..