New RBS Course on Censorship Added to Summer 2025 Schedule
Rare Book School is excited to announce a newly added course to its Summer 2025 schedule. H-205 Censorship from the Inquisition to the Present will run 3–8 August 2025 at the University of Chicago. The first-round deadline to apply for H-205 is Friday, 7 March 2025.
H-205, taught by the University of Chicago’s Ada Palmer, will examine the histories of censorship and information control, with a focus on books and on changes in information technologies. Many sessions will specifically explore censorship in early modern Europe, including the Inquisition and its practices, the impact of the printing press, the economic incentives and profit motives that shaped the entangled histories of censorship and copyright law, and traditions of clandestine literature in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Ada Palmer focuses on the history of censorship and radical thought. She is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago’s History Department, with affiliations in Classics, Gender Studies, and the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She works broadly on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and long-term European history, especially the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Palmer’s first book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014), explores the impact of the rediscovery of classical atomism on the development of modern science and thought, and her new popular press book, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025), aims to introduce general audiences to the way the ideas of a bad Middle Ages and a good Renaissance were formed, both in the early modern period, and by modern historians and propagandists.
Other RBS courses being offered this summer include:
- Analytical Bibliography (G-45), taught by Stephen Tabor at the University of Virginia
- The Stationers’ Company to 1775 (H-80v), taught by Ian Gadd, online only
- The History of the Book in China (H-85), taught by Yuzhou Bai & Soren Edgren at the University of Virginia
- The Bible and Histories of Reading (H-105), taught by Lynne Farrington & Peter Stallybrass at the University of Pennsylvania
- The History & Culture of the Tibetan Book (H-140), taught by Benjamin J. Nourse at the University of Virginia
- Six Degrees of Phillis Wheatley (H-180v), taught by Tara Bynum, online only
- Special Collections Leadership Seminar (L-50), taught by Meredith Evans & Naomi Nelson at the University of Virginia
- Digital Codicology & Book History (L-160), taught by Dot Porter at the University of Pennsylvania
- The History of Typography (T-10), taught by Jill Gage at the Newberry Library in Chicago
For the best chance of being admitted to H-205, please submit your application by the first-round deadline of 7 March. Applications for H-205 and other Summer 2025 courses received after that date will be reviewed on a rolling basis until all available seats have filled. For the complete Summer 2025 course schedule, please visit rarebookschool.org/schedule.