This episode aired on March 17th, 2025 at 12:00pm.
Are you aware that books are being banned in your state and in the United States? You might think, “surely a democracy founded on the notion of free speech would never do such a thing”. But you’d be wrong. The United States (and PA) have banned books. And not just a few. And it continues to do so. In fact, local school districts and city and state governments continue to increase the number of books banned and the type of books banned.
Perhaps you believe that school libraries should be a safe space and you define that safety at least in part by topics covered in books. If so, do you know the topics that move a book from one likely to be assigned in a classroom, to one that could get a teacher fired? And who is actually making these decisions? On this episode of Media Inside Out we’re exploring the slippery slope of banned books. What was banned yesterday. What’s being banned today. What could be banned tomorrow. Let’s go inside!
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’ Loretta C. Duckworth 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.