The University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst has appointed Curtis Brundy dean of University Libraries, effective April 1, 2025. Curtis is currently associate university librarian for Scholarly Communications and Collections at Iowa State University. At UMass, Curtis will succeed Nandita Mani, who has served as dean of University Libraries since August 2022.
At Iowa State, Curtis has served for the last seven years on the library’s leadership team. He oversees collections and open strategies, metadata services, access services, and research data services. Curtis recently led the Iowa State Library through several important initiatives, including strategic planning, AI scenario planning, and the development of journal negotiation principles that were unanimously endorsed by the Faculty Senate. Before joining Iowa State, he served as the library director of both Wartburg College and Western Nebraska Community College.
His research focuses on pricing discrimination in the library journal and database market, and he is an international leader in open access, speaking regularly about open strategy, pricing, and publishing integrity. Curtis serves on several boards, including IOP Publishing, Open Library of Humanities, and the AAAS/Science Library Advisory Board. As the past chair for the Lever Initiative, an open access press led collectively by a group of academic libraries, he has championed making scholarship available to all. Curtis has also served as a member of the OA2020 US Working Group, an information-sharing community focused on establishing universal open access for scholarly literature.
Curtis was an ARL Leadership Fellow in the 2023 cohort. He earned an MA in higher education administration from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, an MSLS from the University of North Texas, and a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
For more details about this transition, see the UMass Amherst news release, “Curtis Brundy Named Dean of University Libraries.”
