Laura Helton is a historian who writes about collections and how they shape our world. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in African American literature, book history, archival studies, and public humanities. She has co-directed DELPHI, the Delaware Public Humanities Institute, since 2023.
Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024) has won multiple awards, including the Eliza Atkins Gleason Award from the American Library Association and the Merle Curti Intellectual History Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
Professor Helton’s research and writings chronicle the emergence of African diasporic archives in the United States and, more broadly, ask how information practices—material acts of collecting, collation, and cataloging—scaffold history and culture. She is a Scholar-Editor of “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” a collaborative digital project with Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Center for Humanities + Information at Penn State, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia.
Professor Helton’s interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist. She has surveyed and processed collections that document the civil rights era, women’s 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.