Bethany Nowviskie is Dean of Libraries and Professor of English at James Madison University, where she also serves as Chief Academic Technology Officer in the division of Academic Affairs. Among other current roles, Nowviskie serves as steering committee chair for VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, a board member for the Educopia Institute, and as co-chair of JMU’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and President’s Council on Health and Well-Being.
From 2015-2019, Nowviskie directed the Digital Library Federation at CLIR (where she has also twice been named a Distinguished Presidential Fellow) while serving as a Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia. She has been a member of the teaching faculty at UVa’s Rare Book School since 2011, was the first director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library (2007-2015), and served as chair of UVa’s General Faculty Council and special advisor to the UVa provost for the advancement of digital humanities research. A past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and chair of the Modern Language Association’s committee on information technology, Nowviskie received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Virginia in 2004 and has worked on numerous ground-breaking projects in digital libraries and the digital humanities. In 2013, she was named one of “Ten Tech Innovators” by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which pretty much summed it up: “Bethany Nowviskie likes to build things.”
A 2016 interview with Nowviskie in the LA Review of Books is available here. She writes (less and less frequently these days!) on liberatory, speculative, and environmentally-informed digital library design at nowviskie.org.