DSSN Grand Opening

At the launch of the new Digital Scholarship Studio and Network, Kathleen Fitzpatrick spoke on “Digital, Public, Scholarship: Sustainable Infrastructure for the Future of the University.” Fitzpatrick is the Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State. She is the author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (2019), Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy (2011), and The Anxiety of Obsolescence (2006). Her previous positions include Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, Visiting Research Professor of English at New York University, co-editor of MediaCommons, and managing editor of PMLA.

Generous Thinking has been featured in The Chronicle of Education and Inside Higher Ed. Readers and reviewers have written:

Stephen Brier, CUNY Graduate Center: "Kathleen Fitzpatrick is one of the smartest and most nimble intellectuals and theorists working in academia today. In Generous Thinking she challenges us to reimagine the university, the work we do, how we do it, and how we share and evaluate it. . . . This book should be read by everyone committed to determining how to save the public university from its neoliberal handlers and its own self-defeating and self-destructive policies and practices."

Rebecca Hussey, Foreword Reviews: Generous Thinking is “potentially revolutionary” and “an indispensable addition to conversations on the state of higher education today.”

Dan Cohen, Vice Provost at Northeastern University: “With universities currently receiving withering criticism from both the right and left, it is critical for all of us in the academy to take Generous Thinking seriously.”

Ryan Boyd, Los Angeles Review of Books: “Generous Thinking is an important book . .  for anyone concerned about the nation’s trajectory. [It is] bracing, lucid, theoretically rich, and, crucially, accessible to a general reader.”