John Unsworth, vice provost for library and technology services and chief information officer, is joining the National Council on the Humanities this year. Unsworth was nominated to the Council, which is the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in December 2011.

The Council, which consists of 26 members, advises the chairman of the NEH. Grants from the NEH help fund libraries, humanities programs at universities, and public radio and television, according to BrandeisNOW.

"It's an honor to be nominated by the President [of the United States], and to be confirmed by the Senate," Unsworth said in an interview with the Justice.

Unsworth's work with the NEH dates back to 1993, when he served as the director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. "The NEH provided support for a number of projects at the Institute over the decade during which I was there, including The Rossetti Archive, The Walt Whitman Archive, The Waters of Rome, The Valley of the Shadow and a number of others," Unsworth said.

"The appointment makes it possible for me to contribute in a new way to the national conversation about humanities scholarship, teaching, and innovation," Unsworth said. "More specifically, it will be an opportunity to have input on the NEH's funding programs and priorities, and to support the only federal funding agency focused entirely on the humanities."

"I truly enjoy the variety of things that my job at Brandeis consists of," Unsworth said when asked about how he balances his different roles. "I like working with information technology, I love figuring out how to help people do their work more effectively, I admire our highly skilled information professionals-a category in which I include both librarians and technologists."

He joined Brandeis in February 2012 after serving as the University of Illionois Urbana-Champlain's dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science for nine years.

Unsworth said he believes the humanities are important because "life is short. The humanities offer us the best way to understand more lives than the one we live."
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