Woman with brown hair, pink shirt, and black blazer looking at camera with a slight smile.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Director of Digital Humanities, Professor of English

Areas of Specialization: Digital Humanities | Digital Media Studies | 20th and 21st Century American Fiction

Research Interests: Critical University Studies | Scholarly Communication | Public Humanities | Social Media

Email: kfitz@msu.edu
Website: kfitz.info

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. Among other projects in that role, she oversaw the development of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. During that time, she also held appointments as Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU and Visiting Professor of Media Studies at Coventry University. Before joining the MLA staff in 2011, she was Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, where she had been a member of the faculty since 1998. 

Fitzpatrick 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 project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 19,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities. She is also co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, where she has led a number of experiments in open peer review and other innovations in scholarly publishing. She serves on the editorial or advisory boards of publications and projects including the Open Library of the Humanities, Luminos, the Open Annotation Collaboration, PressForward, and thresholds. She currently serves as the chair of the board of trustees of the Council on Library and Information Resources, and as Vice-President/President-Elect of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.