Our Team – About Knowledge Commons

The Commons is supported by a core team based within Mesh Research at MSU, as well as a range of other collaborators and supporters. Members of the team blog at Platypus; follow us there for more updates.

MSU Team

Brian Adams

Brian Adams is Associate Director for Technology of MESH Research, where he oversees the development of Mesh projects and manages the Knowledge Commons technical team. Adams has served as lead developer within the College of Arts & Letters at MSU for the last ten years, where he has been instrumental to building numerous research and instructional projects.

Brittany Atkins

Brittany Atkins is a member of our community outreach team and she works with content development. She’s currently a PhD student researching Black horror in film, comic and prose fiction, as well as the monstrous and monstrosity and how these ideas aid in discourse about race, belonging and collective memory.

Larissa Baca

Larissa Baca is the user engagement manager for Knowledge Commons, where she enhances community outreach and provides user support. She is a graduate of Michigan State University with a Master’s degree in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing. She has an extensive background in instructional design, digital marketing, social media management, and technical writing with experience collaborating in arts institutions, non-profits, and business environments. Her academic research interests are educational technology, content strategy, sound studies, writing studies, and the intersections of the humanities within digital spaces.

Grant Eben

Grant Eben is an information technologist employed by the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. He supports Mesh Research as an open-source web developer and has contributed to the development of Pilcrow, Linked Open Profiles, KCWorks on WP, and the Knowledge Commons website.

Martin Paul Eve

Martin is wearing a black coat looking deeply into the camera.

Martin Paul Eve is the technical lead for Knowledge Commons, where he oversees new feature development, platform maintenance, and project direction. Martin previously co-founded the Open Library of Humanities and the Janeway platform. Martin is the winner of the KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Literary Studies, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute’s Open Scholarship Award, and was named by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK. Martin holds a PhD from the University of Sussex and is also Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is project director of Knowledge Commons. She is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she also directs Mesh Research. Prior to joining the MSU faculty, she was Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. Fitzpatrick is author of three books, including Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011). She was also lead author of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (MLA, 2016). She is president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources, and she serves on the advisory boards for numerous projects related to open scholarly communication and infrastructure.

Bonnie Russell

A White woman with blonde and pink shoulder length hair, smiling toward the camera. She is wearing a black shirt and pink glasses.

Bonnie Russell is Associate Director of Mesh Research and the product manager for the Commons, working in close communication with both the technical and the community teams. Ms. Russell is a librarian with a focus on information management, user experience design, and technical project management. She is a core faculty member in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University and serves as the digital strategist for HuMetricsHSS. Most recently she co-authored the OER Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication with support from the Scholarly Communication Notebook.

Scott Schopieray

Scott Schopieray is Assistant Dean for Academic and Research Technology in the College of Arts & Letters at MSU, where he also serves as Associate Director of Mesh. In his position, he works to support digital infrastructure and methods for teaching, learning, and research across the arts and humanities. His current research areas are in high-impact/high-quality online teaching methods, faculty motivation to teach online, and processes for open digital scholarly publishing.

Ian Scott

Ian Scott is Python developer leading work on the Knowledge Commons Repository. Ian comes from an academic background in Religious Studies and Digital Humanities, and he has held faculty positions at Tyndale University and the University of Western Ontario. He has a longstanding passion for open research and for the potential of web technologies to make scholarship more just and accessible. He was co-director of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha and is a member of the technical committee for the Distributed Text Services API standard. Prior to joining the Commons team, he developed an eLearning application for students of ancient Greek.

Dimitris Tzouris

Dimitris Tzouris is our infrastructure developer. He comes to the Commons team from the American College of Thessaloniki, where he developed extensive experience as an instructional technologist. Tzouris has an undergraduate degree in Computer Management Information Systems and has delivered talks and workshops on educational technology at numerous international events. He has served as a member of the coordinating committee of AMICAL, the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries, advising on social media and learning technologies. Tzouris also founded Global Game Jam Thessaloniki and has served as a member of the TEDxThessaloniki team.

Community Student Team

Morgan Myers

Collaborators and Contractors

The Commons is additionally supported by collaborators and contractors including:

Eric Knappe
Michael Thicke
Benjamin Oshrin, Spherical Cow Group
Arlen Johnson, Spherical Cow Group
CUNY Academic Commons team
Boone Gorges, Hard G

Commons Alumni

And last but never least, our growing list of alumni, without whose efforts the Commons would never have made it this far.

Core Team

Collaborators and Contractors

Scott Koranda, Spherical Cow Group
Columbia University Libraries
Zheng Zeng
Scott Voth

In Memoriam

Amaresh Joshi was an information systems designer and programmer in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. He was also also a PhD candidate in linguistics at MSU, with interests in syntax, semantics and computational linguistics. He is greatly missed.