Guided Tour: ‘Banned! A History of Censorship’

Books, libraries, librarians, and writers are subject to attacks—again. Recent bans of books across the United States targeting Black history, the Holocaust, and LGBTQ themes have dominated the news. But book censorship has a longer history.

Federica Francesconi will lead a guided tour through “Banned! A History of Censorship,” a new exhibit that explores this history, along with practices of censorship, the methods to control and ban books and ideas, the resilience of censored works, and attempts to push back.

Learn more about the exhibit.

About the Tour Guide
Federica Francesconi is an associate professor and the director of the Judaic Studies program at the University of Albany. Francesconi is the author of several books and essays. Her latest book, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), won the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize Winner from the American Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Books Award. Among her other publications, there are two coedited volumes: From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardi Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times (2018) and Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (2021), which was a finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Books Award for the Bar­bara Dobkin Award in Women Studies.