William Pannapacker

William Pannapacker is a realtor, professor emeritus of English, and former higher education journalist, consultant, administrator, and fundraiser. He is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship, and numerous articles on literature, higher education, and the Digital Humanities published by Cambridge University Press, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Routledge. In the course of leading that program at Hope College, Pannapacker named and developed the "Digital Liberal Arts," a conceptual expansion of Digital Humanities for teaching institutions that has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and adopted at many colleges throughout the United States. From 2013 to 2015, Pannapacker also served as the director of the Mellon-sponsored Digital Liberal Arts Initiative of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, which sought to develop collaborations in teaching and research across the thirteen member colleges and international partners based in Morocco and Beirut. He was one of the three founding directors of the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS), which has hosted an annual workshop and conference since 2015. From 2016 to 2019 Pannapacker was the senior director of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative of Hope College. This Initiative, according to Pannapacker, attempted "to show how the liberal arts have a transformative role to play in the world: that everyone across academic divisions can benefit from the critical thinking, creativity, and performance--and also the knowledge and skills--developed in complementary disciplines.". Following another award of $800,000 from the Mellon Foundation for community-based partnerships in 2019, he was appointed Senior Director of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Programs and Initiatives at Hope College. In 2022, Pannapacker retired from Hope College with emeritus status.

Pannapacker was a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1998 to 2014. In the Chronicle'''s 50th-anniversary retrospective in 2016, Pannapacker is described as having "helped change the conversation about graduate education, as humanities leaders began to explore limits on enrollment and training students for alternative careers." In 2017 Pannapacker's social media writing was anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading'', edited by Sarah Vowell. In 2021, Pannapacker resumed writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education for an invited series on the changing academic workplace and transitioning into a new career. In 2022-23 he served as a development officer for Chicago Jesuit Academy, a tuition-free, all-Black middle school on the West Side of Chicago. He currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois.