Kathleen Fitzpatrick
@katinalynn Thank you! I’m still pretty verklempt about it all.
Distinguished
I'm a little astonished to be writing this, but my college has posted the news, so it must be true: MSU has named me a University Distinguished Professor. I am honored, and filled with gratitude toward the colleagues who nominated me, and frankly still a bit stunned that this recognition has come my way.
I am grateful to have received so much support for the work I've done over the years, both on campus and off, from publishers and funding agencies, from colleagues and collaborators, from administrators, from friends and family. But my work has always been on the edge of so many fields -- not really literary studies, not really media studies, not really digital humanities, not really higher education studies -- that it has perpetually felt as though it was at risk of falling through the cracks. So this is a career milestone of a sort that I never thought I'd reach.
I'll also note that my institution, like so many large public R1s, heavily favors engineering, business, medicine, and the sciences; the College of Arts & Letters has been significantly underrepresented in university honorifics in recent years. I am the third University Distinguished Professor to be named in the college since 2003 -- twenty-two years! -- and the two scholars named during that period hold joint appointments with colleges on the STEM side of campus. I collaborate with STEM-leaning folks, and I have been successful in obtaining funding from agencies that are valued in that universe, so I acknowledge that I am recognizable to a university-wide committee in ways that someone more squarely located in a humanities-based discipline might not be. I nevertheless hope that I can find ways to enable this new title to help attune the university at large to the crucial kinds of work being done across the arts and humanities.
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Networking Continued
Webmentions
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Congratulations on behalf of All Fitzpatricks!
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Thank you!
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
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