Abstract

This bit of free advice is on the topic of interim leadership in academic settings. I’ll talk about why one cares who comes after, then we’ll explore some norms and assumptions around interim leadership in academia and talk about the implications of taking on an interim role, and finally I’ll ground my generalizations in experience from my nine-year engagement as dean of libraries at the university of Virginia, ending with a mediation on the wisdom of avoiding interims altogether, when you can.

Brief Bio

I grew up on the campus of Smith College, and I graduated from Amherst College in 1981 with a BA in English, did an MA in English at Boston University and then a PhD in English at the University of Virginia. My first faculty position was at North Carolina State University’s English department, from 1988-1992: during this period I co-founded the online journal Postmodern Culture. In 1993, I was hired back to UVA as the director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and a tenure-track associate professor of English. In 1998, I was tenured and I continued at IATH and UVA until 2003; during this period I incorporated the Text Encoding Initiative as a non-profit membership organization. In 2003, I moved to the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) as Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where I stayed until 2012; during this period I co-edited (with Ray Siemens and Susan Schriebman) the first Companion to Digital Humanities, which appeared in print in 2004, and I co-founded the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (with Harold Short and Ray Siemens) in 2005. I led the production of Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006), and I co-PI’d one of the first wave of National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation grants from the Library of Congress, as well as several Mellon-funded text-mining and machine learning grants focused on humanities data. It was in Illinois that I first started working with The HistoryMakers project, with a focus on re-engineering the infrastructure of this massive African-American video oral history resource. As Dean, I also led a successful $20M capital campaign, replaced long-standing deficits with positive cash balances, increased the size and diversity of both faculty and students, and doubled the size of our online program. In 2012, I was hired at Brandeis University as their University Librarian and Chief Information Officer, with a courtesy appointment in English. During this period, I continued working with The HistoryMakers, now with a focus on getting them into the collections of academic research libraries. While at Brandeis I also started work on EMMA (Educational Materials Made Accessible), a repository for sharing print made accessible for students with a variety of print disabilities. In 2016, I moved back to Charlottesville, UVA having hired me as University Librarian and Dean of Libraries. During this time, I continued developing EMMA, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, and a second edition of the Companion to Digital Humanities was published. From 2020-2024 I led a $165M capital project to renovate, rebuild, and rename the main library, which was completed in April of 2024. I also led a successful $100M capital campaign, as part of the University campaign which concluded in June of 2025. I retired on September 15, 2025.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Unsworth, J., (2026), "How to create organizations that don’t depend on you, and how to leave them", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/1BWA-MR37)

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1. dh
2. digital humanities
3. project management
4. project transition
5. succession
6. transitions and succession
7. united states