Last year, the American Library Association tracked challenges to 4,235 unique book titles, the second-highest total ever recorded. During Banned Books Week, October 4–10, the USC Libraries will explore the long history and continuing consequences of efforts to restrict what people can read.
On Monday, October 5, the libraries host “Freedom to Read: Censorship in Schools and Libraries,” a panel discussion featuring public school teacher and author Ernesto Cisneros and former librarian Erin Spivey. Moderated by Dr. Huriya Jabbar of the USC Rossier School of Education, the conversation will explore censorship, intellectual freedom, and contemporary efforts to defend the right to read. The event runs from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in Doheny Memorial Library’s Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall (Room 240) and will also be livestreamed on Zoom. RSVP online.
Anchoring the libraries’ Banned Books Week programming is Forbidden Pages: Past and Present, a new exhibition opening Monday, October 5, in Doheny Memorial Library’s first-floor foyer. Forbidden Pages features books, periodicals, photographs, and other materials from the USC Libraries’ collections that tell the story of censorship and resistance over the centuries. Among them are a charred fragment of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jud Süß, pulled from the embers of the Nazi book burnings in Berlin in 1933; a 1761 edition of the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its centuries-long list of prohibited books; and a 1954 issue of ONE Magazine which the Los Angeles postmaster declared obscene and refused to mail. Visitors will also encounter works by authors ranging from John Milton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain to Toni Morrison, Judy Blume, and Salman Rushdie.
Organized around the themes “Dangerous Words,” “Obscenity and Censorship,” “Silencing the Other,” and “Pages of Protest,” the exhibition asks not only why particular books have been suppressed, but what those efforts reveal about the societies that attempted to silence them. It also examines the resistance censorship has provoked—from authors who published in defiance of government restrictions to readers, publishers, and advocacy groups that fought to keep contested works in circulation. Forbidden Pages: Past and Present will remain on display throughout USC’s fall 2026 semester.
In advance of Banned Books Week, the USC Libraries are also encouraging members of the USC community to watch The Librarians, winner of the 2026 Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Directed by Kim A. Snyder, the documentary film follows librarians around the country as they respond to a sweeping wave of book challenges and find themselves on the front lines of disputes over First Amendment rights, public education, and access to information. USC students, faculty, and staff can watch the film through the USC Libraries website; PBS Passport members can also stream it through PBS. In addition, the USC Libraries’ own Taylor Dwyer, curator of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, will participate in a panel discussion that follows a special screening of the film at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium on Sunday, October 11.
For more information about Banned Books Week at the USC Libraries, including links to register for the October 5 panel and watch The Librarians, see the USC Libraries’ Banned Books Week research guide.