Humanities Crossroads: Dialogues for the Future
Time: Nov. 13, 2026, 8:30 a.m. - 6:15 p.m.
Location: Strasser Legacy Room, 220 Eggers
We invite our community to come together for a day of shared dialogues and stimulating keynotes to consider how the humanities sit at and function as a “crossroads.”
Crossroads are sites of convergence, movement, and transition. As liminal thresholds, they are also decision points. Crossroads are places of consequence and encounter that invite us to pause, get our bearings, and ask where we might go next.
Discussions will:
- center the humanities as a public good;
- highlight how collaboration sparks innovation;
- explore humanities infrastructures to support shared thriving; and
- examine the importance of community-engaged work.
Detailed schedule coming soon. . .
Keynote Speakers:
(pictured-left) Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Letters and University Distinguished Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role, she was Director of DH@MSU and founding director of Mesh Research, a lab focused on the future of scholarly communication. She is project director of Knowledge Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 60,000 scholars and practitioners across the disciplines and around the world, and she is author of several books, including Leading Generously: Tools for Transformation, (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011). She is past president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute and of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
(pictured-right) Katina L. Rogers is a writer, educator, and independent scholar. She is the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020); Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing (punctum books, 2024); and Unexpected Flourishing: Growth from Decay in the Mycelial University (forthcoming from punctum books). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. With over a decade of experience as a researcher, administrator, and educator, Dr. Rogers works with colleges and universities to design and implement creative, sustainable, and equitable structures for graduate education through Inkcap Consulting, which she founded in 2021. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Planning Committee:
- Gwendolyn Pough, Associate Dean, Arts and Sciences
- Vivian May, Syracuse University Humanities Center Director
- Brice Nordquist, Director, Engaged Humanities Network
- Sarah Workman, Director for Research Development (Arts and Humanities)