John Unsworth
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John Unsworth is the university librarian and dean of libraries at the
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
, a position he has held since June 25, 2016.


Biography

John Unsworth was born in 1958, in
Northampton, Massachusetts The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of Northampton (including its outer villages, Florence and Leeds) was 29,571. Northampton is known as an a ...
. He graduated from Northampton High School in 1975, and attended Princeton University and Amherst College as an undergraduate, graduating from Amherst in 1981. He received a master's degree in English from Boston University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1988. His first faculty appointment was in English, at North Carolina State University, from 1989 to 1993. In 1990, at
North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The univers ...
, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, ''
Postmodern Culture ''Postmodern Culture'' is an electronic academic journal established in 1990. It is the result of an early experiment in electronic content delivery via the Internet. The journal publishes commentary and criticism on a wide range of concerns inclu ...
'' (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of
Project Muse Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 univers ...
). He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, co-chaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of th
Association for Computers and the Humanities
and later as chair of the steering committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, as well as serving on many other editorial and advisory boards. From 1993 to 2003, he was a faculty member in the English department at the
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
, where he served as the first director of the
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide ...
. From 2003 to 2012 he was the dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...
and was also on the faculty of the English department. From 2012 to 2016, he was the university librarian, vice provost, and chief information officer at
Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , p ...
. Unsworth was also a professor of English at Brandeis, teaching courses on the
Digital Humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...
and on 20th-century American bestsellers. In August 2013, the White House appointed Unsworth to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the
National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
, a post he held through January 26, 2016. John Unsworth is the university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia, a position he has held since June 25, 2016.


Bibliography

* Unsworth, J., Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Eds). “A Companion to Digital Humanities” New York: Blackwells (2004). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ * ‘Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ (Commission chair). ACLS: New York, 2006. Available: http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ourculturalcommonwealth.pdf * Unsworth, J.,
Lou Burnard Lou Burnard (born 1946 in Birmingham, England) is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUC ...
, and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Eds). “Electronic Textual Editing” New York: MLA, 2006. http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/ * Unsworth, J. "University 2.0" in ''The Tower and the Cloud''. Richard N. Katz, (Ed.). EDUCAUSE, 2008. . http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/tower-and-cloud * “Medievalists as Early Adopters of Information Technology” Digital Medievalist 7 (2011). http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/7/unsworth/ * Video: On May 25, 2012, the BNN Symposium featured Paul Courant and John Unsworth at the MIT Faculty Club in Cambridge speaking on "The Hathi Trust, Google Books, and the Future of Research.
"Building (and using) Big Digital Libraries"Video
also available from the Boston Library Consortium.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Unsworth, John Living people Year of birth missing (living people) People in digital humanities American librarians University of Virginia faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty People from Northampton, Massachusetts