Virginia Steele Wood has been named the recipient of the 2024 Commodore Dudley W. Knox Award.
The annual award is named for Commodore Dudley Wright Knox (1877–1960), esteemed historian, librarian, and archivist of the Navy. Established by the Naval Historical Foundation in 2013 and now carried forward by the U.S. Naval Institute, the medal is presented to individuals who have dedicated a lifetime of work to furthering the public’s understanding of naval history.
Virginia Steele Wood is an educator, archivist, historian, and librarian. As Senior Reference Librarian and Specialist for Naval and Maritime History in the Humanities and Social Science Division of the Library of Congress from 1979 to 2011, she played a critical role in supporting scholarship and sustaining and expanding resources for naval and maritime history. Her duties included leading research projects, performing in-depth research synthesized from the library’s extensive collections, providing expert reference service to Congress and other researchers, and managing and mentoring junior research staff.
For her work, she was recognized with the K. Jack Bauer Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Maritime History and Distinguished Service to the North American Society for Oceanic History in 1994.
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Wood received her BA in history in 1952 from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC-Greensboro), a master’s degree in education from Boston University in 1958, and a master’s degree in library and information science from the Catholic University of America in 1983. She taught in public and private schools in North Carolina and Cambridge, Massachusetts, before beginning a career in archives and history editing at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University.
The role of curator’s assistant followed at the USS Constitution Museum, where she identified and arranged the photograph collection. Moving to Washington, D.C., she worked as archivist of the Americana Collection of Historical Documents (to 1830) at the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution Headquarters. In 1979, she joined the staff of the Library of Congress, where she worked for the next 32 years.
Wood is the author of 22 research guides, monographs, book chapters, and journal articles, as well as the editor of several 18th- and early 19th-century diaries. Her book Live Oaking: Southern Timber for Tall Ships (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981; reprint, Naval Institute Press, 1994) was awarded the North American Society for Oceanic History’s John Lyman Book Award, in the History of Marine Science and Technology category. Her article “The Georgia Navy’s Dramatic Victory of April 18, 1778,” received the E. Merton Coulter Award for the most distinguished article published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly in 2006. She also won the John Gardner Maritime Research Award, presented by the Fellows, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut, for “significant contributions to the field of American maritime research.”
Wood’s service to naval and maritime history also includes serving on the Secretary of the Navy’s Advisory Subcommittee on Naval History for the maximum two terms, 1989–2006; as a member of the Naval Historical Foundation Board of Directors, 2008–17; as a member of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Historic Preservation Study Committee, American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service; and as a member of the Executive Council and Secretary of the North American Society for Oceanic History, 1992–2011. Now retired, she resides in Richmond, Virginia.
