Join us for the next live episode of Media Inside Out on Monday, March 17th at noon as we discuss how book bans across the country limit access to diverse stories and shape the future of education and free expression. As censorship debates grow in schools and libraries nationwide, this discussion is more timely than ever. We will be joined in the studio by a professor and librarian, Laura McGrath and Alex Wermer-Colan, who have studied patterns in banned books using text mining and digital humanities techniques. Their team, consisting of faculty, library staff, and students, analyzed how race, gender, and other forms of representation appear in these books to understand why they are being challenged.
Guests
Laura McGrath
Laura B. McGrath is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University, specializing in computational literary criticism and contemporary American literature. Her research examines post-1945 American literature, digital humanities, cultural analytics, and the role of literary agents in shaping contemporary literary production. Right now, she is working on a book called Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature, under contract with Princeton University Press and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Alex Wermer-Colan
Alex Wermer-Colan is the Academic and Research Director of Temple University Libraries’ Scholars Studio, where he directs and advises interdisciplinary teaching and research projects leveraging emerging technologies. Alex also serves as the Managing Editor for the Programming Historian in English and the Executive Director of Philly Community Wireless. With a Ph.D. In English, Alex’s scholarship on literature and culture has appeared in a wide variety of publications as the LA Review of Books, Twentieth Century Literature, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, the Yearbook of Comparative Literature, and Indiana University Press. His translation of Jean Cocteau’s Letter to the Americans was published in 2022 by New Directions. Alex is currently leading multiple digitization projects at Temple Libraries, including digitizing science fiction literature, as well as digitizing contemporary fiction and non-fiction books that have been recently banned in schools and libraries across America.