Charles Henry

President

Charles Henry is the president of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.

Before coming to CLIR in 2007, Charles was the provost and university librarian at Rice University, where he was responsible for library services and programs, including the Digital Library Initiative and the Digital Media Center. He served as publisher of Rice University Press, the nation's first all-digital university press. He was chair of the advisory committee for the Information Resource Center at the International University of Bremen (now Jacobs University) for many years, and was a member of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

He is currently on the Board of Trustees of Tan Tao University in Vietnam, serves on the advisory board of Stanford University Libraries, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Qatar National Library, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Charles has written dozens of publications and has received numerous grants and awards, including from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. He received a Fulbright senior scholar grant for library sciences in New Zealand and, more recently, in China, and a Fulbright award for the study of medieval literature in Vienna, Austria. Charles has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University, among other degrees.