This international conference seeks to revisit the legacy of banned books and state censorship from the Cold War to the present in the East European context. It aims to spotlight clandestine circulation, publication, and reception of banned books in the past and their resonance today, when creative expression is again under threat due to political upheavals, wars, migration crises, and the resulting cultural exterritoriality. The purpose of the conference is to situate these processes comparatively, across various geopolitical contexts and genres, with a focus on Eastern Europe. World-leading specialists from different disciplines (historians, literary scholars, librarians, archivists, journalists, publishers, and writers) will explore banned books and exterritorial publishing from a theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives, e.g., the covert publications and circulation of Orwell’s novels behind the Iron Curtain, war narratives that violate state doctrines from WWII to the present, banned books in the Internet era, East European diasporas and literary institutions. The conference, organized by Yasha Klots (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center), is sponsored by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences and co-hosted by Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Banned Books from the Cold War to the Present
