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Burning the Books

When: —
Venue: Online

Book your place

Please note, due to a change in circumstances this event will now take place online.

The event joining link will be circulated to those registered on Tuesday morning, 5 October.

Join the Birkbeck Postgraduate Readers Group for the next session in the Discover the Past programme. Richard Ovenden, head of Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries will be discussing his book, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (John Murray, 2020).

Ovenden opens his book with the bonfire held on Berlin’s Unter den Linden in May 1933, in which thousands of texts written by those deemed ‘un-German’ were burned. Shocking, he argues, but the desire to destroy knowledge was not new. Citing specific incidents of archives and libraries being attacked from ancient Mesopotamia up to the present day, he argues that the desire to destroy knowledge was not new, but part of a longer tradition. In addition to the deliberate destruction of information in war, Ovenden warns of the dangers of neglect through underfunding, low prioritisation and disregard for institutions that promote the sharing of knowledge. He also reminds us of the vulnerability and possible loss of archival sources and books now available online but held in private hands (eg. By companies such as Google and Facebook) and the risk that the formats in which they are held could become obsolete.

 

*Attendees should read the book before coming to the event.*

 

The event is free but places are limited and booking is essential.

This event will be held online. 

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This event is part of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology's Discover the Past events series, open to the public and students. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.

The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.

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