Planned Obsolescence

Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate ProfessorEnglish and Media StudiesPomona CollegeRead Bio

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the digital future of scholarship, and in particularly to the technological and infrastructural development necessary to new publishing structures. This talk will argue, however, that there is a set of social, intellectual, and institutional changes that will be a precondition for any such technological development to succeed, requiring scholars to think differently about the ways we write, the ways we publish, and the ways we review, in order to make any digital publishing future a reality.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies and chair of the Media Studies program at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is the author of "The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television" (Vanderbilt UP, 2006), which was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" for 2007 by CHOICE. She serves on the editorial board of the Pearson Custom Introduction to Literature database anthology, as well as of the Journal of e-Media Studies and the Journal of Transformative Works, and is a member of the executive committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Media and Literature. She is currently working on a book-length project, to be published by New York University Press, entitled "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy."

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).