About
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she also directs
MESH, a research and development unit focused on the future of scholarly communication. She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 30,000 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world, and she 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 president of the board of directors of the
Educopia Institute, and she served as president of the
Association for Computers and the Humanities from 2020 to 2022.
Find me on
hcommons.social.
Mastodon Feed
Getting crazy traction on my last post so updating the sticky post to be more accurate for today. (2026-01-07 ↗)
Just FYI: this is part of the damage being done by extractive AI companies. Their scraper bots routinely DDOS us, and they multiply to take up as much bandwidth as is available. We are having to put a huge percentage of our developers’ time into just keeping the site alive rather than building its future. They are actively destroying everything worthwhile about the internet. @hello https://hcommons.social/@hello/115854618561953712 (2026-01-07 ↗)
The alt text does not include that the Statue of Liberty is making the women's hand signal for help, indicating that she's experiencing domestic abuse, relationship violence, sexual aggression, or human trafficking. 🥺 @streetartutopia https://mastodon.online/@streetartutopia/115832828936281143 (2026-01-03 ↗)
“A distributed/federated repository run by universities” is a solid description of Knowledge Commons Works. We’re seeking institutions and organizations world-wide that want to join our coalition and help ensure that it remains community-governed and self-sustaining. Find us at https://hcommons.org and send your university librarian, CIO, and VP of research to https://join.hcommons.org to learn more! (Note that while we are based in the US our near-term goals include establishing hosting outside North America, to ensure that the knowledge we gather remains free and open.) @GeorgWeissenbacher https://fediscience.org/@GeorgWeissenbacher/115830597970072629 (2026-01-03 ↗)
Sequence in my timeline. Little visit Down Under, @jnonfiction? cc @slevelt (Edited to add alt text!) (2026-01-03 ↗)
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.
