Navigating the New Normal? Book Bans & Challenges in the USA
Book bans and challenges in US public schools have been increasing at unprecedented rates over the past five years, with PEN America reporting a ‘complex and extensive climate of censorship’ across the country in their 2025 report, ‘The Normalization of Book Banning’. Isolated protests by concerned individuals have been replaced by well-funded, coordinated attacks from organizations such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn for Education. Since January 2025, these threats to young people’s freedom to read have been playing out in a broader context of repression, backed up by legislation and policy at both state and federal level. Individuals – such as Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden – have been removed from their posts; specific topics and materials have been deleted from government websites; funding has been withdrawn.
As this crackdown leads to copycat acts on this side of the Atlantic, thinking and talking publicly about censorship and its ramifications is something we want to make space for here in Münster. To facilitate this, Dr Cedric Essi (University of Zurich) will moderate a panel of four distinguished speakers from the US and Germany:
- Emily Drabinski, Associate Professor and Chair of the Queens College School of Information Studies, CUNY, served as President of the American Library Association from 2023-24;
- Maude Hines is Professor of English and Chair of Black Studies at Portland State University;
- Writer and activist Kelly Jensen has been widely commended for her anti-censorship work, including by the American Association of School Librarians and Publishers Weekly, for whom she was a person of the year 2022;
- Corinna Norrick-Rühl is the Chair of Book Studies at the University of Münster and co-founder of the Banned Books Network Münster.
The event will be in person only and will not be recorded. We hope you can join us for what promises to be a compelling and timely discussion.
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