Dulcey Hunter spent more than two decades teaching middle and high school students in Florida before trading the classroom for a research post at one of the country's most prominent universities. This fall, she became the University of Chicago's first Banned Books Postdoctoral Scholar, a newly created role dedicated to studying how book bans affect the people living through them.
Hunter joined UChicago on September 1 as the inaugural scholar in the position, according to the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, with an appointment running from September 2026 through June 2027. As Chicago Tribune reporter Darcel Rockett notes, Hunter will work full time studying the impact of book bans, a role that puts her at the center of a fight playing out in school boards and library meetings across the country.
Before coming to Chicago, Hunter taught in Pinellas County, Florida, for many years, telling the University of South Florida College of Education, “I worked for many years as an English teacher in Pinellas County.” That classroom experience is shaping her academic focus: according to the Chicago Forum, her research will examine how book banning intersects with depictions and experiences of trauma. University of Chicago News reports she plans to investigate the experiences of teachers who have taught a banned or challenged book and how representations of trauma in literature intersect with the impacts of censorship.
A Pedagogy Framework Built Around Trauma
Per the Tribune's reporting, Hunter will spend the coming academic year building a pedagogy framework meant to help teachers understand why narratives depicting difficult life experiences and painful truths get censored in the first place. She hopes the work will give educators information to use a comprehensive, trauma-informed approach when teaching banned books, and she wants to bolster teachers' ability to engage with students who have themselves been traumatized, the Tribune reports.
Hunter told the Tribune that classrooms are vital educational spaces for exploring life's difficulties and hardships together, and that book-banning reflects struggles over whose stories may be told and whose suffering is culturally visible. She also said book bans tend to focus on narratives that challenge established mores and touch on identity, cultural memory and collective witnessing, per the same report. Her recommendation to the public, as relayed by the Tribune, is straightforward: pay attention to what is happening in local schools and libraries.
Hunter is also launching a public-facing project alongside her research. The Tribune reports she will host a monthly Instagram video series called Banned and Brilliant, which recommends and discusses a book historically banned or challenged somewhere in the United States; the series launched in October with Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, according to the same account.
Why UChicago Built This Role Now
The timing follows a sharp national rise in challenges. The American Library Association reported that challenges to books have accelerated, the Tribune notes, and the group's own data back that up: the ALA tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second-highest number it has ever documented, according to the American Library Association. Only 2023, when the ALA documented 4,240 unique titles challenged, ranks higher.
The ALA also found that of the unique titles challenged in 2025, 1,671, or 40%, represented the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color. Perhaps more striking is who is behind the challenges: 92% were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers in 2025, up from 72% in 2024, the association reported. Its Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 5,668 books banned from libraries in 2025, which it said amounted to 66% of the total challenged.
Both the ALA and PEN America conduct research on censorship, the Tribune notes, underscoring that Hunter's academic post adds a new, classroom-focused lens to that broader body of work. UChicago librarian Reimer, quoted in the Tribune's report, said most book challenges are driven by interest groups and that bans undermine librarians' roles as trusted information brokers, contributing to a wider questioning of science, research and evidence-based arguments.
How UChicago's Library Built Its Collection
Hunter's position builds on infrastructure the university's library system started assembling three years ago. The UChicago Library launched its Banned Books Initiative in 2023, according to the Chicago Forum, with a mission to collect books banned and challenged across the country and make them available on campus in digital formats and through interlibrary loan. University of Chicago News separately reported that the collection now includes more than 2,000 banned books, while the Tribune's report describes the library as having collected thousands of titles.
According to the Tribune, the library completed a first phase of collecting banned books and making them accessible, and has since focused a second phase on uplifting discussion of those books to improve its work. Reimer told the Tribune the next step is enabling academic research on the impact of book bans — the very kind of research Hunter has now been hired to conduct. Back in 2023, University of Chicago News reported that members of the public could consult collection items in person at the Regenstein, Mansueto and Crerar libraries free of charge with a visitor pass, and that same report noted the ALA had recorded challenges to 1,915 unique titles in just the first eight months of 2023, a 20% increase over the comparable period in 2022.
Illinois and Chicago's Parallel Efforts
UChicago's initiative sits alongside other local and state responses to the surge in challenges. Illinois enacted a law in 2023 allowing the secretary of state's office to withhold grant funding from municipal and school district libraries that do not adopt the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, which states that materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval, according to the Tribune's reporting.
Chicago and Chicago Public Library officials established “Book Sanctuaries” across the city's 77 community areas and 81 library branches in 2022, according to the Chicago Public Library. Those sanctuaries expanded local access to banned or challenged books, and CPL specifically expanded access to titles including The Hate U Give, Beyond Magenta and All American Boys to the broader Chicago community, per the library's own announcement.
Taken together, the local Book Sanctuaries, the university's multi-year collection project and Hunter's new research post reflect a city and an institution responding in parallel to the same national trend. For Hunter, whose own years in a Florida classroom shape how she frames the stakes, the work now moves from teaching banned books to studying what teaching them costs and demands of the educators who do it.
