Challinor, Joan R.

Civic leader and writer Joan R. Challinor served as director of Knight-Ridder, Incorporated, as chair of the United States National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, chair of the Advisory Committee of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and as a member of the Madison Council at the Library of Congress. Her dissertation was on the life of Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams (American University, 1982), and she subsequently edited (with Alan J. Lichtman) Kin and Communities (1979) and (with Robert L. Beisner) Arms at Rest: Peacemaking and Peacekeeping in American History (1987).

Joan R. Challinor was born in New York City on March 25, 1927, to Marie Thompson Ridder and Victor Frank Ridder. She attended the Brearley School in New York City (1932–1945) and Wells College in Aurora, New York (1945–1947). In 1952 she married David Challinor and settled in Washington, DC. They had four children together: Julia, Mary, Sarah, and David. Her husband, a conservationist and scientific administrator at the Smithsonian Institution, died in 2008.

She received her BA (1971), MA (1974), and PhD (1982) in History from American University in Washington, DC. Her research specialty was colonial America; her dissertation, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams: The Price of Ambition, was a biography of the wife of John Quincy Adams. She was a lecturer at American University (1981–1984), where she also received the Distinguished Alumni Award (1985). She served as a research associate at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution (1984–1990), and received honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College (1991). Challinor has written numerous essays, edited two books - Kin and Communities: Families in America (1979) and Arms at Rest: Peacemaking and Peacekeeping in American History (1987) - and also was a producer and project director in the 1990s on a documentary film about Thomas Paine. Throughout her career, Challinor has lectured on a wide range of topics, including "Are Libraries as We Know Them Endangered Species in the Internet Era?" and "Women in the Developing World and Information Literacy," which was the 2003 keynote address at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization/National Commission on Libraries and Information Science Forum on Information Literacy.

Challinor has served on several advisory committees and worked with or supported numerous organizations, many of which are library and education-related. She joined the Schlesinger Library Advisory Committee in 1980, serving as chair from 1986 through 2002. President Bill Clinton appointed Challinor to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) in 1995; she was reappointed in 2000, and asked by President George Bush to serve as interim chair from July 2003 to January 2004. She was a member of numerous other boards and committees. Because of her work as the director of the French-American Foundation, she received the Medal of the City of Paris from President Jacques Chirac in 1983.

In addition to her committee and organizational work, from 1989 to 2001 she was a director of Knight Ridder, Inc., a newspaper and electronic publisher and family business responsible for numerous daily newspapers and a variety of business, financial, professional, science, and technology on-line retrieval, database, and CD ROM services.

In 2011, Joan Challinor continues to live and work in the Washington, DC, area.