Many attempts to ban books in schools and libraries have made headlines over the past few months. Almost all of these attempts have failed and yet the attempts continue. Why do people ban books? What are they trying to accomplish?
Join us for Alumni College with associate professor in the School of Information Sciences, Emily Knox.
Speaker: Emily Knox
Emily is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences (the iSchool, formerly GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, information ethics, information policy, and the intersection of print culture and reading practices. She is also a member of the Mapping Information Access research team. Emily recently co-edited Foundations of Information Ethics published by American Library Association. She also edited Trigger Warnings: History, Theory Context, published by Rowman & Littlefield and is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars' Series. Her next book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom will be published by American Library Association in 2022. Her articles have been published in the Library Quarterly, Library and Information Science Research, and the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. Emily also contributed a chapter on religion and intellectual freedom to the Library Juice Press Handbook of Intellectual Freedom: Concepts, Cases, and Theories, the 2016 winnter of the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award for the best published work in intellectual freedom. She is on the boards of the Beta Phi Mu and the National Coalition Against Censorship and previously served on the boards of the Association for Information Science & Technology and the Freedom to Read Foundation. She is the assistant editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. Emily received her Ph.D. from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information. Her master's in library and information science is from the iSchool at Illinois. She also hold a B.A. in Religious Studies from Smith College and an A.M. in the same field from The University of Chicago Divinity School. She was the Associate Director and Reference Librarian at the St. Mark's (now Keller) Library of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City for five years before returning to school. Emily previously wrote a manual on running a small interlibrary loan and document delivery department published by Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association (ALA). It is listed as a key source in Library and Information Science: A Guide to Key Literature and Sources (Bemis, 2014, p. 107).
