Knox elected to Freedom to Read Foundation board

Emily Knox
Emily Knox, Interim Dean Designate and Professor

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF). Her one-year term will begin at the annual meeting of the board during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in June.

“Once again, the Freedom to Read Foundation board brings deep financial, professional, and marketing expertise to our work,” said James LaRue (MS '81), director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of FTRF. “We are grateful to have their counsel as we litigate, advocate, educate, and fundraise to defend the fundamental rights of free expression, privacy, and access to information.”

Knox’s research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, information ethics, information policy, and the intersection of print culture and reading practices. In 2015 she was awarded the Illinois Library Association Intellectual Freedom Award and was named an Instructor of the Year by the Web-based Information Science Education (WISE) Consortium.

Knox’s book, Book Banning in 21st Century America, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in January 2015. It is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars’ Series. The book is an expansion of the analysis presented in her Library & Information Science Research article, "Society, institutions, and common sense: Themes in the discourse of challengers in 21st century United States."

Knox also contributed a chapter on religion and intellectual freedom to The Library Juice Press Handbook of Intellectual Freedom: Concepts, Cases, and Theories, the 2016 winner of the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award for best published work in intellectual freedom. She previously wrote a manual on running a small interlibrary loan and document delivery department published by Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association. It is listed as a key source in Library and Information Science: A Guide to Key Literature and Sources (Bemis, 2014, p. 107).

Knox received her PhD from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information. Her master’s in library and information science is from GSLIS. She also holds a BA in religious studies from Smith College and an AM in the same field from The University of Chicago Divinity School. She was the Associate Director and Reference Librarian at the St. Mark’s (now Keller) Library of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City for five years before returning to school.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Knox appointed interim dean

Professor Emily Knox has been appointed to serve as interim dean of the School of Information Sciences, pending approval by the Board of Trustees. Until officially approved, her title will be interim dean designate. The appointment will begin April 1, 2025.

Emily Knox

iSchool instructors ranked as excellent

Fifty-six iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2024 and Winter 2024-2025. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the ratings from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. 

iSchool Building

Ocepek and Sanfilippo co-edit book on misinformation

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons book

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."