Why Reading Banned Books Still Matters in 2026

U.S. literature and culture expert Priscilla Wald vividly recalls reading “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a child. One precise passage opened her to the questions that shape her scholarship and teaching today: Where do our beliefs come from and what happens when we begin to question them? 

“I remember reading that book and thinking, ‘Wow, Huck is willing to have values that challenge the values he’s been raised with,’” Wald said. “That impressed me as a 9-year-old.” 

Wald’s childhood admiration for Huck stayed with her, even as she came to understand the objections that have made the novel a frequent target of book bans. “Of course, when I studied the book later, I understood the concerns about the use of racist language and stereotyping,” she said. “But I think it is worth studying for many reasons, not least because of how it explores racism and gets entangled in it. It’s a window onto an ugly part of U.S. history, and it raises important questions about how we do and don’t transcend our limitations.” 

For Wald, who is the R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, her early childhood experience with the text helped her understand literature as a powerful way to examine how people inherit ideas about right and wrong, belonging and exclusion. It also illustrates why, for Wald — and fellow Duke professor Robyn Wiegman — reading contested books still matters in 2026. 

Wiegman, professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, teaches the Trinity course English 242S: Banned Books. She developed the class to approach censorship as a recurring feature of literary and cultural history, examining what happens when books challenge established ideas about race, power, sexuality, religion or authority. 

“Almost every single text that’s understood to be part of the American literary canon has been banned at one point in time,” Wiegman said. “Banning is not new.” 

Her syllabus has included George Orwell’s “1984,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” The texts span genres and historical periods, and the reasons for challenging them are similarly varied. 

For example, Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Wiegman explained, has been considered controversial because it centers homosexuality and also, at one point in time, because its characters are white — raising questions about whose stories authors are expected to tell. 

“‘Whose story belongs to whom’ has been used as a basis for censorship,” Wiegman said. “Can a Black author write about white experience? Can a white author write about Indigenous life? We explore these questions in thinking about why some books are banned.”   

For alumnus Camden Chin (T’26), reading “Giovanni’s Room” in Wiegman’s class made that question personal. As a queer man, he found it disturbing that the experiences depicted in the book he loved could be considered dangerous. “The book does not feel dangerous to me,” Chin said. “It feels deeply human.” 

Wiegman's Banned Books course also asks students to consider what readers may lose when a book disappears from circulation. Discussions of Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” which centers on a 12-year-old girl who experiences sexual violence, addresses questions of age, context and care. 

Chin understands the instinct to protect young readers from disturbing material, but as a Duke student, the novel left him with another question: “If we remove a book because an experience is too disturbing to read about, are we protecting students, or are we making the people who actually lived through that experience less visible?” 

“Reading is pedagogical,” Wiegman said. “It instructs people into their own lives and the lives of other people.” 

For some young readers, encountering a difficult reality in literature can offer recognition — and the possibility of finding help, Wiegman explained. “It could be very important to know that this kind of abuse is a reality and that there are resources in the world if this happens to you, as opposed to complete silence.” 

Focusing on how stories shape lives goes hand in hand with Wald’s scholarship on how communities form shared ideas about truth, value and belonging. In additional to serving as the Chair of the English Department, she’s also a Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, and teaches English 360S: The Environment in Literature, Law, and Science. 

Wald teaches Duke students the ways that literature can shape collective beliefs while also challenging them. “Works of literature are one of the significant places where fundamental, value-producing stories take shape,” she said. “But books also challenge those stories. In a way, they’redoing opposite things: shaping what we believe while questioning those beliefs.” 

That tension, she believes, is central to learning. “Learning involves unlearning,” she said. “And that can be uncomfortable.” 

Chin agrees. “Encountering something disturbing, offensive, or even morally repugnant is not, by itself, a reason to forbid us from reading it,” he said. “In fact, sometimes the discomfort is precisely the point.” 

Neither professor suggests that students must approve of every work they study. Instead, their classrooms provide spaces to examine language, history, form and consequence — and to develop arguments through sustained conversation. 

“I don’t want to tell students that something is wrong,” Wald said. “I want them to discuss, and I want to see where that discussion goes.” 

For Chin, that same approach made Wiegman’s course especially memorable. 

“Dr. Wiegman’s class taught me that books are banned for many cruel and complicated reasons,” he said. “We use the word ‘banned’ for situations that can involve very different motivations and very different kinds of power.” 

Wiegman believes that kind of engagement reflects the enduring purpose and power of the humanities. Her course description reads: “By the end of the term, students will have a broader understanding of the role that literature — and by extension the humanities as a whole — has played in political struggles over cultural representation, historical memory, identity and democratic debate.” 

By the time he completed Wiegman’s course, Chin was more opposed to censorship, but less certain that any single principle can settle every question it raises. Like Huck, who first prompted Wald to wonder where our values come from, Chin began to question beliefs he once took for granted. “If there is a credible reason to believe that a text can contribute to real-world violence, is restricting access to it still censorship in the same sense?” he asked. “Or is there some point at which preventing harm outweighs the principle that knowledge should be freely available?” 

During Banned Books Week 2026, Wiegman and Wald’s message is ultimately an optimistic one: Reading banned books is an invitation — not to accept every idea within them — but to remain curious enough to question inherited beliefs, examine why certain stories are challenged and imagine a more expansive world. 

*** 

Banned Books Week takes place Oct. 4–10, 2026, bringing together readers, librarians, educators and publishers around the theme “Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read.” The week concludes Saturday, Oct. 10, with Let Freedom Read Day, an opportunity to reflect on the role books play in learning and discovery.