Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

John Unsworth was born in 1958, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He 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 PhD in English from the University of Virginia, in 1988. Following a one-year faculty appointment at the University of Virginia, Unsworth joined the English department at North Carolina State University, where (in 1990) he co-founded and began co-editing Postmodern Culture, the Internet's first peer-reviewed scholarly journal—now part of Johns Hopkins UP's Project Muse. At NCSU, he was an early experimenter with educational uses of MUDs and MOOs, teaching several composition classes in virtual classrooms.

In 1993, Unsworth returned to the University of Virginia, as Director of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and as faculty in the department of English. In the English department, he teaches hypertext theory, literary theory, postmodernism, popular fiction, publishing technologies, and American literature, and in 1997 he received tenure in that department. As the institute's director, he has overseen research projects across the disciplines in the humanities, published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, supervised the institute's software development program, and helped to secure grants for Institute projects from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, IBM, Sun, and others. He has also won two major grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one for a project with the University of Virginia Library, to explore library collection and dissemination of born-digital scholarly research, and the other to create an electronic imprint at the University Press of Virginia to publish originally digital scholarship in the humanities.

Professor Unsworth also serves as chairman of the board of directors of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, President of the Associations for Computers and the Humanities, and co-chair of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, as well as serving on many other editorial and advisory boards concerned with electronic and scholarly publishing. He is also the principal designer and acting director of a new master's degree in digital humanities at the University of Virginia. Most recently, he has been named Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (starting in August, 2003), with appointments as Professor in GSLIS, in the department of English, and on the library faculty. Further information is at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/.