Laura Helton

English

Laura Helton

Associate Professor

lehelton@udel.edu

Office: 308 Memorial Hall

Resources and Links

Laura Helton's Google Scholar Publications

Biography

Laura Helton, who holds a joint appointment in the Departments of English and History, specializes in African American print culture, archival studies and public humanities. Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores the emergence of African American archives and libraries to show how historical recuperation shaped forms of racial imagination in the early twentieth century. This book received the Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America, the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award from the American Library Association.

Professor Helton recently curated the exhibition “To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library” for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she is a former scholar-in-residence. Her collaborative work on the Home to Harlem project, which reconstructed a nearly complete bibliography of the original Schomburg library, culminated in Black Studies on 135^th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection (Yale University Press, 2026), co-edited with Barrye Brown and Vanessa K. Valdés. Helton also serves as a scholar-editor of “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” a collaborative digital editing project with Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Her writing on collectors, collections and how they shape our world has appeared in LitHub, African American Review, Papers of the Modern Language Association, American Literary History, Social Text, and numerous edited volumes. Her article, “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading," won the Donald G. Davis Article Award from the American Library Association and the Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society.

Helton's interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist, which is a cornerstone of her teaching for UD’s Museum Studies and Public Engagement program. She has surveyed and processed collections that document the civil rights era, feminist and LGBTQ rights movements, and American radicalism for several cultural institutions, including the Mississippi Digital Library, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, CityLore, and the Schomburg Center. She has also worked with arts organizations as a grant writer and curator.

Publications

“In the Parlors of Black Bibliophiles,” LitHub, April 20, 2026

Black Studies on 135^th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection, with Barrye Brown and Vanessa K. Valdés (Yale University Press, 2026)

“The Ephemeral Langston Hughes,” with Theresa Hessey and Curtis Small, Jr., in Teaching Text Technologies and Critical Bibliography Among the Disciplines, ed. Barbara Heritage and Donna Sy (Routledge, 2025): 122-131

“‘Whenever you need any book in my library’: Arturo Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, and the Curation of ‘American Negro’ Poetry,” American Literary History 37, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 635-647

Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024)

“Schomburg’s Library and the Price of Black History,” African American Review 54, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2021): 109-128

“Archive,” in Information Keywords, ed. Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan Abel (Columbia University Press, 2021): 44-56

“On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading,” PMLA 134, no. 1 (January 2019): 99-120

“Making Lists, Keeping Time: Infrastructures of Black Thought, 1900-1950,” in Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, ed. Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019): 82-108

For a full list of publications, see https://laura-helton.com/.