Dr. Emily D. Spunaugle selected as the 2025 Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award recipient

CHICAGO - The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award. The Dain award is given every two years and is a named in honor of a library historian widely known as a supportive advisor and mentor as well as a rigorous scholar and thinker. The award recognizes an outstanding dissertation in English in the general area of library history. Awardees receive a certificate and five hundred dollars.

The 2025 Dain award recognizes an original dissertation completed in 2023 and 2024. Entries were judged on clear definition of research questions and/or hypotheses, use of appropriate primary resources, depth of research, superior quality of writing, and significance of conclusions. The award committee was particularly interested in dissertations that placed library history within a broader historical, social, cultural, and political context and that made interdisciplinary connections with print culture and/or information studies.

The 2025 Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award recipient is Dr. Emily D. Spunaugle for her dissertation, Printed for the Benefit: British Women’s Benevolent Publications in the Long Eighteenth Century. Spunaugle’s work fills a gap in the literature and makes groundbreaking connections regarding how library catalogs and systems have excluded works by female writers, impacting visibility and discoverability.

In Printed for the Benefit, Spunaugle focuses on an overlooked category of self-published works: women’s non-commercial publications for charity. Examining how these works were printed, marketed, sold and read, Spunaugle shares how female authors navigated the publishing world at a time when writing as a profession was mostly closed to them. With a strong librarian's and special collection librarian's eye for key bibliographies and reference tools such as the Short Title Catalog, Spunaugle shows that the lack of attention to these benefit publications has led to disinformation and a far less nuanced or inclusive reading of gender diversity in print. Employing extensive research in primary sources and ample secondary research, Spunaugle creates a compelling case for reassessment of women writers in 18th Century Britain and how we might understand benevolent publications of that time. Dr. Spunaugle completed her Ph.D. in English at Wayne State University in 2024.

In addition to the Dain Award, the committee selected a recipient for a 2025 Certificate of Merit. The certificate of merit does not include a cash prize and is infrequently awarded; it recognizes additional work considered impactful to the field of library history. The 2025 Certificate of Merit is awarded to Dr. L. Boyd Bellinger (Ph.D., University of Illinois-Chicago, 2024) for his dissertation examining the history and gentrification of libraries and library services in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood, All Are Welcome? Unpacking Struggles for Hegemony in Urban Public Libraries.

Applications for the Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award are due each January. Dissertations are read and evaluated by an award committee. Committee members for the 2025 cycle were Sterling Coleman, Rachel Leff, Frédéric Santerre, Barry Seaver, Andrew Werthheimer, and Deborah Smith (Chair). Submissions for the next award cycle will open in January 2027. For more information, please visit: https://www.ala.org/lhrt/awards/phyllis-dain-library-history-dissertation-award