Associate Professor Emily Knox will deliver the Masha Dexter Lecture on Gender, Sexuality, and Public Policy at Brown University on April 7. The purpose of the annual lecture is to "memorialize and promote in other students Masha Dexter's extraordinary energy and engagement with the overlapping issues of gender, sexuality, and public policy, as reflected in the broad range of her own activities."
In her presentation, "Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice: Understanding the Discourse of Censorship," Knox will discuss the underpinnings of contemporary book bans and will provide recommendations for how to address book censorship in schools and public libraries.
"My talk will focus on information that will be covered in my forthcoming book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom," said Knox.
Knox's research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, the intersection of print culture and reading practices, and information ethics and policy. Her books include Book Banning in 21st Century America; Document Delivery and Interlibrary Loan on a Shoestring; Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context; and Foundations of Information Ethics, which she co-edited with John T. F. Burgess. She received her PhD from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and her MS from the iSchool at Illinois.