The iSchool is proud to announce the promotion of three faculty to associate professor with indefinite tenure: Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke, Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner, and Assistant Professor Emily Knox. Their new appointments will be effective August 16, 2018, pending final approval by the Board of Trustees.
Cooke's research interests include human information behavior, particularly in the online context; critical cultural information studies; and diversity and social justice in librarianship with an emphasis on infusing them into LIS education and pedagogy. She is the 2017 recipient of the American Library Association (ALA) Achievement in Library Diversity Research Award as well as 2016 recipient of the ALA Equality Award. Cooke is the author of Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals (Libraries Unlimited, 2016) and coeditor with Miriam E. Sweeney (PhD '13) of Teaching for Justice: Implementing Social Justice in the LIS Classroom (Litwin Books/Library Juice Press, 2017). She is the director for Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). Cooke holds a PhD in communication, information, and library studies from Rutgers University.
Diesner's research in human-centered data science and computational social sciences combines methods from network science, natural language processing and machine learning with theories from the social sciences, humanities, and linguistics to advance knowledge and discovery about interaction-based and information-based systems. Recognition for her research expertise includes appointments as the CIO Scholar for Information Research & Technology at Illinois (2018), faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois (2015), and as a research fellow in the Dori J. Maynard Senior Research Fellows program (2016), a collaboration of The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She holds a PhD from the Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) program at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
Knox's research interests include intellectual freedom and censorship, the intersection of print culture and reading practices, and information ethics and policy. She recently edited Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context (2017), published by Rowman & Littlefield. Her previous book, Book Banning in 21st-Century America, also published by Rowman & Littlefield (2015), addresses challenges to materials in public libraries and schools. Knox serves on the boards of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Freedom to Read Foundation, and National Coalition Against Censorship. Knox received her PhD from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, and she earned her master's in library and information science from the iSchool at Illinois.