Research & Creative Activity at the College of Arts & Letters
Annual Report 2024-2025
The College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University is committed to becoming an irresistible destination for students, faculty, and staff who want to develop and share the knowledge and shape the culture that can help create a better world. The work done under the rubric of “research and creative activity” within the college is as varied as the college’s many fields. Not only does that work explore different aspects of contemporary and historical cultures, including the many different forms and languages that are used to represent and share ideas around the world, but it also employs a wide range of disciplinary methodologies and results in an equally wide range of outputs. Members of the college write and publish scholarly books and articles, to be sure — but they also publish creative writing; they develop and share digital platforms and projects; they create and exhibit works of art and curate exhibitions of the art created by others; they develop and stage theatrical performances; they produce and exhibit both fiction and documentary films; and more besides.
What all these forms of research and creative activity in the college share is a desire to have an impact on the communities in which we live, to contribute to our shared, multifarious culture, and to further our collective understanding of how cultural production creates meaning and shapes the world.
No report can adequately represent the full range of work that is in progress within the college, but I hope with this document to share a snapshot of our colleagues’ accomplishments over the course of the 2024-25 academic year. This year has been a challenging one, to say the least; the sudden termination of many federal grants, the decimation of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the executive orders calling into question the validity of entire areas of study in our fields and the values with which we engage with our work and one another have been devastating for many of us. And yet we hold tightly to those values of equity, openness, and community, and we continue to think about how each of us can create the greatest impact with our work as we cultivate our own pathways to intellectual leadership.
I hope that you find in this report a glimpse of the potential of the College of Arts & Letters and its impact on our communities, the state of Michigan, and the world beyond. We look forward to hearing any thoughts you may wish to share with us.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies