Henderson Lecture featuring Emily Knox- "Book Banning in 21st Century America: An Ongoing Threat to Information Access”
Join the School of Information and Library Science and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) for an evening celebrating information, scholarship and community!
We invite you to attend the Henderson Lecture featuring Emily Knox, interim dean and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as the keynote speaker. The lecture, “Book Banning in 21st Century America: An Ongoing Threat to Information Access,” will take place on Friday, April 24, 2026, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Freedom Forum, Carroll Hall Room 305, and will be followed by a reception with hors d’oeuvres and conversation from 6:30 to 7:15 p.m.
The first 50 people to RSVP will receive a complimentary copy of Emily Knox’s “Book Banning in 21st-Century America.“
HR 7661, or the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, recently passed out of the U.S. House Committee on Education. The bill is the first attempt at federal legislation in the post-2020 book banning era. The bill is short, but it provides insight into the types of information that can be seen as threatening. What would the effect of this bill be? What can it tell us about book banning more generally, and how do we respond to this type of legislation?
About the Lucille Kelling Henderson Lecture:
The Lucile Kelling Henderson Lecture Series was established in 1990 to honor the memory of Lucile K. Henderson, SILS faculty member (1932-1960) and dean (1954-1960). As an excellent teacher, administrator, counselor and adviser, Henderson made many contributions to the University and to the profession. She died in 1990 at the age of 95. To learn more about the Henderson Lecture and previous speakers, click here.
More about Emily Knox:
Emily is interim dean and professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship. She is a member of the Mapping Information Access research team.
The second edition of her book, Book Banning in 21st Century America (Bloomsbury), was published in January 2026. Her previous book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom (ALA Neal-Schuman), won the 2023 Eli M. Oboler Prize for best published work in the area of intellectual freedom. She has been interviewed by media outlets such as NPR and the New York Times and also testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on book banning.
Emily previously served on the boards of the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Freedom to Read Foundation and is a former editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy.
She received her Ph.D. from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information.
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at Carroll Hall, Freedom Forum, Room 305.
