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.