In 1990, at North Carolina State University, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of Project Muse).
[4] He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, co-chaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and later as chair of the steering committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, as well as serving on many other editorial and advisory boards.
From 1993 to 2003, he was a faculty member in the English department at the University of Virginia, where he served as the first director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
[5] From 2003 to 2012 he was the dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was also on the faculty of the English department.
Unsworth was also a professor of English at Brandeis, teaching courses on the Digital Humanities and on 20th-century American bestsellers.