Last Updated on September 12, 2025, 1:12 pm ET
John Unsworth retired this month as university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia (UVA), after more than nine years in the role. We chatted with him about his career and the profession—the interview follows.
Katherine: How did your career begin?
John: I started as tenure-track faculty in an English department and then moved into part-time administration, first at a digital humanities center, then full-time in a library school, then in a library. This path is somewhat unusual for a university librarian. I’m not unique as a university librarian in having that faculty credential or in having run a library school—Jeff Mackie-Mason and Jon Cawthorne have also been dean of a school of information and dean of a library, and once upon a time it wasn’t unusual for a professor to end up running the library. But today, it’s not a crowded category.
Katherine: How did you get started in librarianship?
John: I read Adriene Lim’s interview, which you sent me. And it’s fabulous. It’s inspirational. I’ve already recommended it to some other readers, and I would recommend it to anybody who’s reading this interview. I can’t offer that kind of story. But I’m going to do my best to emulate Adriene’s candor in talking about her experience when I talk about my experience.
My unusual trajectory was predicated on—privilege alert—my frequent and often deliberate failure to do what was expected of me at a number of important stages along my way. By doing this, I did at least establish that it was possible to do things differently and to survive as a faculty member in the tenure system at a rigorous and conservative English department in a public research university.
But my library origin story is really the story of someone who first became part of the professoriate at an entry level, then became interested in editing an electronic journal starting in 1989, and then started to talk about it with libraries in the context of the serials crisis in the early ’90s. From publishing the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture, I got connected to and eventually drawn into library schools, by way of the first Companion to Digital Humanities. After about a decade of leading a library school, Brandeis offered me the opportunity to run a library, and from there I was able to make a case for my candidacy for dean of libraries at Virginia, where it certainly helped that I was a known quantity. I did get tenure along the way, during the 1990s at UVA—and thereby hangs a tale, but I retire this summer as both dean of libraries and professor of English.
Katherine: I’d love to hear some of the highlights of your career.
John: Well, for anybody who’s a faculty member, the first book is a highlight. Mine was (…disappointingly) a co-edited collection of essays rather than a monograph by me, which is what I was supposed to do.
The collection was selected from four years of essays published in Postmodern Culture, and it came out in 1994. We editors selected the essays that we liked best to make up this volume. The cover was designed by a fabulous British book designer named Richard Eckersley, who also had designed Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, which came out in 1991 from the University of Nebraska Press. So, we were really thrilled when Oxford hired that book designer to do the design for Postmodern Culture. I got my first copy, opened it up—and immediately spotted a typo in the table of contents! So there’s some kind of cosmic lesson there for editors everywhere. But still, that book is a highlight for me.
Generally, though, the most rewarding things I’ve done are things that make a difference and that continue without me, like Postmodern Culture, which I worked on in the ’90s, but which is still publishing today in 2025. Another was the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, which I ran for 10 years from 1993 to 2003, which also still exists, and is now part of the UVA Library as part of our Digital Humanities Center along with the Scholars’ Lab. A lot of this work was in the context of digital humanities, or what used to be called humanities computing (until another edited collection in 2008 helped to rename it).
I did a lot of work with the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and with my leadership counterparts in Europe and Canada. We put together what’s now the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations—with more than a dozen constituent organizations from Canada, the US, Mexico, Australasia, Africa, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Perhaps most importantly, I changed the publishing arrangements for the ACH from a very unfavorable deal with one publisher to a much better deal with another, Oxford University Press. In directly related work, I incorporated the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in 2000, an international standards organization, but also the longest running, organized and documented ontological debate about the nature and structure of literary and linguistic texts, and I served the TEI in various roles for about the next 10 years. That’s still going strong.
The iSchools consortium—literally a group of four schools when I got to Illinois—is now 130 schools of information and library science around the world that meet regularly and promote research and education in the field.
The HistoryMakers, a remarkable collection of video oral histories of African Americans in all walks of life, represents for me some applied work in digital humanities, through my long-standing collaboration with the HistoryMakers that began at Illinois and concluded at Virginia. The last chapter of that collaboration focused on getting the HistoryMakers re-engineered to be accessible and have a VPAT that libraries could accept so that libraries could subscribe to it and become the source of revenue for the project. They’re now in more than 150 academic libraries, including 42 in Virginia, thanks to their first consortial agreement with VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, which I helped to broker.
But my capstone has to be the renovation, construction, and renaming of what’s now called Shannon Library, UVA’s humanities and social sciences library. And that’s certainly going to last for a very long time. The building was originally named for UVA’s first president, Edwin Alderman, a champion of eugenics. It’s now named for Edgar Shannon, who was the fourth president of UVA, and who was a champion of co-education and integration and a scholar of Tennyson. I’m very happy with the building itself, and equally happy to have accomplished the renaming. In retrospect it seemed like that was done in a vanishing window of opportunity.
Katherine: Are there goals you’ve set that you haven’t yet reached?
John: It remains to be seen whether we’ll reach the library’s $100 million capital campaign goal by the end of June, when the campaign ends, but we’re close. I think we can do it—but that’s the biggest item on the to-do list.
Katherine: I’d love to hear advice that you have for those who might aspire to leadership roles in research libraries
John: I think the advice I would offer is to remember that leadership is a service role. Your job as a leader is to support the people who work for you, to protect them, to listen to them, and prioritize them. And if you don’t do those things, you will find leadership a very lonely engagement, particularly when you yourself need support. Also, be a good partner and collaborator: what goes around, comes around.
Katherine: What are the key issues that you think research libraries will face in the next five years?
John: In a nutshell, the challenge we face in libraries and in higher education and beyond in the US is government-sponsored fascism. This has all kinds of manifestations, and it has all kinds of unfortunately obvious historical precedents. Timothy Snyder is a historian of Eastern Europe in the 20th century who has written exhaustively and persuasively on the parallels. And at this point I don’t think there can be any doubt that that’s the moment we’re in. So the question is: what do libraries do in this situation?
21st-century fascism is not just about governing through force. It’s also about surveillance. It’s about AI in the service of fascism, as a tool of surveillance. It’s about dismembering the public sector, through the Department of Government Evisceration. It’s about systematically erasing history, including data and primary source materials. This is foundational, for fascism—to distort the record or obscure it or simply deprive people of public data so that there is no independent source of fact. We’re seeing that right now. We’re also going to see more intimidation of individuals, more anti-union work, more anti-intellectualism, more loyalty tests, and on and on.
What we’re experiencing in universities specifically right now is a concerted effort to bring us all to heel, and also to demonstrate that anybody who tugs on the leash will be dealt with harshly in public and persecuted in private. It’s not going to be an easy time for knowledge institutions, for public institutions, for libraries or for their leaders.
Katherine: You mentioned privilege earlier. How can librarians leverage privilege in standing up to fascism?
John: There is real responsibility to leverage your privilege in whatever way you can, and to use it to push back in whatever way you can. For me right now, that’s being a small part of the data rescue effort. I’m really inspired by the energy and commitment that I see in these efforts, both at the national level and here at the UVA Libraries.
Also, obviously, this is a time for public protests and demonstrations. I really think the general public needs to turn out in very large numbers in the streets. We shouldn’t be waiting around for someone to wade in and do it for us.
Katherine: What still inspires you about librarianship?
John: Librarians generally really want people to have the best, the most usable, the most relevant information for their purposes. I know that librarians will continue to pursue that mission, even in difficult times. The librarians who do persist in that mission will be the heroes of the next decade.
Katherine: Which areas in librarianship would you encourage young professionals to focus on?
John: In the current moment, community archives and community organizing, data curation, encryption, information services to migrant communities, climate information, first amendment rights and history, memory and memory as resistance, the history of information systems as instruments of empire and authoritarianism.
Katherine: We’d love to hear what you’re looking forward to in your next phase.
John: Spending time at anti-fascist demonstrations. And fishing.
Katherine: Anything else you want to share that we haven’t covered already, or anything you want to elaborate on?
John: I was brought up on a college campus. I was born to college and university life. I was a faculty brat. But more important to me was being brought up in a household that put its own safety and security on the line for social justice.
Richard Unsworth, who is my dad, was chaplain at Smith College during the Civil Rights anti-war movement, and the first wave of the women’s rights movements. My mom worked full time as the school psychologist and took care of four of us while my dad was off in the Deep South, getting arrested or arranging bail for others. My family dinner table hosted religious and secular leaders of liberation movements and liberation theology. Those people were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist—and activists, all of them. They were united by their belief in what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community. They were also united in believing that students absolutely had standing to express themselves on issues of liberation and self-determination. Liberation theology was a very thought-provoking milieu in which to grow up. I’m not a religious person but I also don’t think that it’s necessary to appeal to the transcendental to make the case for social justice. I grew up not really understanding my privilege but understanding the responsibility to use it for justice. Later I came to understand more about exactly what that privilege was, and how and when and why to use it.
Katherine: You and I have had a lot of conversations about accessibility for people with disabilities. Hearing your story illuminates where your dedication and commitment to that work came from.
John: You have got to have tremendous admiration for students who are persevering through the kinds of obstacles that disabilities present so that they can get an education in order to contribute something to the world. There’s a lot of trash talk about equity these days. But leveling the playing field just means exercising fundamental fairness. I think whatever we can do to make it no more difficult for someone with a print disability to succeed than it is for their fellow students without those disabilities, we should be doing that. We’ll never succeed entirely, and it’s always going to be more difficult for people with disabilities to succeed. But that is also a matter of degree, and it makes a difference whether it’s less difficult or more difficult, less discouraging or more discouraging.
I got involved with accessibility around 10 years ago. It was when I was running the library at Brandeis. I was part of the Boston Library Consortium, and I asked the people in the consortium whether any of their libraries were involved in making educational content accessible for students. None of them were. And it really struck me that, you know, providing educational materials for students is such a core library mission for any other student. Why wouldn’t it be a core library mission for students with disabilities as well? Why should that mission be relegated to a small if hearty crew of disability service officers in a tiny office somewhere who are trying to keep up with the needs of an entire campus? Couldn’t libraries contribute what they know about information organization, about preservation, about discovery, about sharing? Certainly there’s a lot that we could do to make this better.
At the time my impression was that libraries were scared off by the magnitude of the task on the one hand, and by potential liability on the other. And they really didn’t want to have any part of that if they could avoid it. A lot has changed in the last 10 years, but it is still only just beginning to penetrate the library world as something that really ought to be considered part of their mission.
Katherine: This has been a great conversation. Any final thoughts you’d like to share?
John: I think in the next four years, and maybe longer, there’s going to be a really concerted effort to splinter different communities and to preempt collective action, on any front where it’s possible to do so.
There are 50 universities on the US Department of Education’s list of universities that can expect to be investigated over “anti-semitism”—and I have to put quotes around that, because I don’t accept the current equation of anti-semitism with any opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. I certainly hope that those universities are talking to each other and organizing and coordinating a game plan on the legal front and on the PR front. Collective action is really the only course of action here that makes any sense. And you can tell it makes sense, because there will be an effort to prevent it from happening.
As a founding father once said, we must hang together, or most certainly we will hang separately. I think that has never been more true than at the present moment. So for people coming into the universities, people coming into libraries, look to your local, national, and international communities and be a contributing member to those communities. Organize with those communities. Don’t be an island. Don’t go it alone. There is strength in numbers.
