08/31/2026
It is with a heavy heart we share the following message from President Rice.
"Dear Campus Community,
It is with profound sadness that I share news of the passing of Dr. John Zaborney, Professor of History, who passed away today, August 31, after a period of serious illness which he faced with the same determination and fortitude that defined his work as a scholar, colleague, and mentor. Some of you may have known of his illness; all of us knew how engaged John was, until very recently, in designing, developing, and teaching courses and programs, including the Master of Arts in American Studies that has just completed its initial year. The guidance and leadership that John provided students and colleagues alike for so long makes his loss especially difficult. Our thoughts, especially, are with Dr. Kim Sebold, both his life partner and lifetime colleague; who has shown such grace, care, and perseverance these last few months, not just for John, but for his students, and all those with whom he worked.
John joined the UMPI faculty on September 1, 1997, as an Assistant Professor of History. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and to Professor in 2013. He coordinated the History and Political Science program for many years, up until his passing, and served as its institutional memory through significant disciplinary and institutional change. He ensured that the humanities would reach ever larger populations of students, even in the most challenging of times, by leading the move to put History and Political Science online and then, in 2020, adding it to UMPI’s YourPace programming, resulting in over 230 total majors last year, making it the largest such program in the entirety of the UMS.
Above all, John was an outstanding and accomplished scholar. His book, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), was the first sustained study of its subject, and it was grounded in painstaking research of primary sources, the product of years spent with letters, account books, diaries, and court records. Prevailing scholarship had treated the hiring-out of enslaved people as a marginal practice, but John demonstrated how it worked not to weaken the institution of slavery but to further entrench it — knitting slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike into slavery's economy so thoroughly that Virginia's path toward secession becomes, in his telling, difficult to imagine otherwise. More recently, he had turned to the other laborers of that same world — the working-class men and "plain folk" of pre-Civil War Virginia who left few monuments and fewer papers — and he was at work on that research as a second book through this past year. The scholar and the teacher were never separate people for John: the same conviction animated both, that the past is not a refuge from the present but the only ground on which the present can be understood.
We are so grateful for what John gave to our community and the thousands of students he served during his time with us."
