Jessica's Affiliations: Vibrant Media Lab, Homewood CEC, STEM Coding Lab, August Wilson House, Provost Academy, Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, Digital Media Lab, Remake Learning, CEC Hill District, Provost Academy Courses, Homewood Children's Village, First Year Programs
Jessica FitzPatrick earned her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. She conducts research at the confluence of postcolonial theory, speculative fiction studies, spatial studies, and new media creation. FitzPatrick recently articulated the idea of thirdspace-weilding “Twenty-First Century Afrofuturist Aliens” in Extrapolation and worked towards “Restoring the ‘Lived space of the body’” to critical making in the electronic book review. Her current projects include the book project, Hacking the Future: the Space and Place of Earth in Postcolonial Science Fiction, and digital and public humanities ventures like the Secret Pittsburgh Digital Guidebook, which exhibits student-generated explorations of Pittsburgh sites and stories. She regularly teaches courses like Narrative and Technology, Digital Narrative and Interactive Design, Secret Pittsburgh, Global Fictions, and Science Fiction.
As the Director of the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) program, FitzPatrick works with DNID students, faculty, and advisors across the School of Computing and Information and the English Department in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. She regularly mentors DNID students as they design and implement projects that unite narrative with code and worldbuilding with interactive interface.
FitzPatrick also directs the English Department’s Digital Media Lab (DML), which supports educational programming and creative pedagogy about digital media. Through the DML, she organizes an annual Digital Media & Design Showcase featuring undergraduate and graduate digital and critical making projects.