In response to the steep increase in book banning and (attempted) censorship in the USA and beyond, the University of Münster’s Chairs for Book Studies (Prof. Dr. Norrick-Rühl) and American Studies (Prof. Dr. Schultermandl) have founded a “Banned Books Network Münster” (BBNM). Two postdoctoral researchers at the Chair of American Studies, Dr. Jennifer Gouck (2025 WiRe fellow) and Dr. Sarah Pyke, are co-founders of this initiative. Our purpose is to raise awareness of the increase in book banning, and to create space for engagement with banned books and the wider repercussions of these bans. Our events are inclusive in nature, and we hope to engage students, teachers, colleagues and the wider reading public with our initiative.

The first event will take place at SpecOps on Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 6pm. Registration is requested, but not mandatory. Please follow this link for more information: https://indico.uni-muenster.de/event/3370/. We look forward to seeing you there.

If you would like to know more and stay up to date about our events, please join our email mailing list by registering here: https://listserv.uni-muenster.de/mailman/listinfo/banned-books-network. We will only distribute network-specific information through the list. You can unsubscribe at any time.

We will share more resources here soon. In the meantime, we highly recommend the websites of PEN America and the American Library Association (ALA), which both share statistics and infographics about challenged and banned books.