University librarian closes chapter

For outgoing University Librarian John Unsworth (Grad class of ’88), the path to library leadership took a circuitous route. 

“There’s never been a plan,” Unsworth said. 

After nearly a decade leading UVA’s libraries, including through the renovation of Shannon Library and the pandemic, Unsworth will retire in September when his successor, Leo S. Lo, dean of the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico, takes over.

Unsworth’s graduate study at UVA focused on the publication of postmodern literature and experimental fiction, which eventually led him to a teaching job at North Carolina State University. Unsworth, Eyal Amiran (Grad class of ’84 class of ’89) and two other colleagues founded the first electronic peer-reviewed journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture, which continues to be published. 

He returned to UVA in 1993 to become the first director of its Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, helping traditional scholars navigate the nascent internet to share their work. 

After a decade at UVA, he served as dean of the graduate school of library and information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and university librarian at Brandeis.

When he returned to Grounds in 2016 to become UVA librarian, he knew it would be a big job. Plans were already in the works for a massive renovation of Shannon. Then came the pandemic. Unsworth guided the construction while managing pandemic-related challenges.

Unsworth announced his retirement in February and will remain in the role until Sept. 15 when Lo steps in. Lo, a longtime library leader and artificial intelligence scholar, holds a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania and a postgraduate diploma in AI from the University of Oxford. Lo is co-author of the forthcoming book, AI and the Future Workforce: A Reskilling Guide for Academic Libraries.