Panel: “The Future of Scholarly Communication," a conversation with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Seth Denbo, and Maria Bonn

• Event Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2014
• Time: 4:30 pm–6:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

The ubiquity of digital technology and networked communication, in parallel with changing dynamics and economics of scholarship and the academy have led to rapid change in scholarly communication. While it appears clear that sharing scholarship and engaging in scholarly dialogue will remain central to the academic enterprise, the best ways to share and to conduct that dialogue are less clear. Libraries, scholarly societies, and, of course, scholars themselves are all assessing both present and future modes and methods of communication. This panel discussion will be conducted by those on the front lines of that assessment and of innovations in response.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association and Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, where she has led a number of experiments in open peer review and other innovations in scholarly publishing.

Seth Denbo oversees the publication department of the AHA and is working to develop innovative digital projects to enhance the organization's mission. He earned his PhD from the University of Warwick and is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century Britain. He has taught British history in universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has also worked on digital projects at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at UMD and the Department for Digital Humanities at King's College London. Over the past 10 years, Seth has participated actively in the development of innovative digital tools and methods for historical scholarship. Drawing on his experience as a teacher and researcher he played a key role in several international projects that expanded capacity for digital scholarship in the humanities. He also conceived and organized an ongoing seminar in digital history at the Institute of Historical Research in London that has been at the forefront of fostering innovation in the use of digital tools and methods for the study of history.

Maria Bonn is a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches courses on the role of libraries in scholarly communication and publishing. Prior to her teaching appointment, Bonn served as the associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, with responsibility for publishing and scholarly communications initiatives, including the University of Michigan Press, the Scholarly Publishing Office, the institutional repository (Deep Blue), the Copyright Office, and the Text Creation Partnership. Bonn has also been an assistant professor of English at Albion College and taught at Sichuan International Studies University (Chongqing, China) and Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey). She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester, master's and doctoral degrees in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master’s in information and library science from the University of Michigan.

This Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) event is presented in collaboration with the Scholarly Commons of the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, with co-sponsorship by the Spurlock Museum.