Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication, Modern Language Association, and professor of media studies at Pomona College, will visit campus on Thursday, April 5, for two events: A lecture, “Peer Review, Open Scholarship, and the Digital Humanities,” at noon, in the Taylor Science Center Kennedy Auditorium, and a workshop at 4:10 p.m., in Kirner-Johnson Building, room 101. Both are free and open to the public.

Fitzpatrick’s lecture will examine peer review as a contemporary phenomenon in scholarly publishing. As scholarly publishing becomes increasingly digitalized, peer review is gradually losing salience. Fitzpatrick’s lecture will discuss past and present criticism of peer review as a means of speculating about its future role in academia.

Fitzpatrick is the author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy and Anxiety and Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television.  She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, and has published scholarly articles in publications such as Journal of Electronic Publishing, PMLA, Contemporary Literature, and Cinema Journal.

Fitzpatrick’s visit is co-sponsored by the Dean of Faculty and the Digital Humanities Initiative.