By Abigail Jones

West Virginia University Libraries selected undergraduate students Ren Kully, Bailey South, and Siegrid Tuttle as the 2025 Robert F. Munn Library Scholars Award recipients.

This year’s recipients were selected from a highly competitive pool of outstanding research paper submissions in the humanities and social sciences.

Along with a $1,000 award, their names will be added to a plaque in the WVU Downtown Library and their papers added to the Research Repository @ WVU at researchrepository.wvu.edu/munn.

Kully was named a Munn Scholar for their thesis titled, “From Bones to Bias: Exploring Demographic Gaps in the WVU Osteological Collection,” which explores historical biases surrounding osteological collections and highlights the need for equitable representation, ethical stewardship, and revised methods to mitigate bias in osteological teaching and research.

South was named a Munn Scholar for her thesis titled, “The Man, the Myth, the Mothman: Cryptid Folklore and West Virginian Identity Formation,” which explores how West Virginians connect state identity and cryptid folklore to the broader reclamation of West Virginian identity.

Tuttle was named a Munn Scholar for their thesis, “The Rise and Fall of U.S. Support for Operation Condor,” which explores the understudied relationship between South American dictatorships and the United States during a covert, U.S.-backed campaign of political repression and state terror carried out in South America during the 1970s and 1980s.