​Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good​

 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of digital humanities and professor of English at Michigan State University, will give the Scholars’ Convocation Lecture at Grinnell College on Thursday, March 1.

The free and public lecture, titled “Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good,” will start at 11 a.m. in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

Fitzpatrick’s lecture is based on a book she is writing with the same title. In her talk, she will examine the 21st-century university and the importance of the humanities to its success. In particular, she argues that humanistic work should be rooted in generosity and argues that the humanities have sometimes over-relied on critique as the primary focus of their work. She posits that humanities scholars should strive to think with, rather than reflexively against, other scholars and the surrounding community.

Prior to joining Michigan State University’s faculty in 2017, Fitzpatrick served as associate executive director and director of scholarly communication of the Modern Language Association, where she was managing editor of MLA publications. At that time, she also held an appointment as visiting research professor of English at New York University.

Fitzpatrick is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 10,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities.