Laura Helton is a historian who writes about collections and how they shape our world.
She is currently an Associate Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, where she teaches African American literature, book history, archival studies, and public humanities.
Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, was published by Columbia University Press in 2024. It has won multiple prizes, including the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America.
Her 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 literary and historical thought.
With Barrye Brown and Vanessa K. Valdés, she is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection, which features the first-ever published list of the books and pamphlets in Arturo Schomburg’s famous library, which planted the seed for what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black 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, 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 movement, 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.
Forthcoming April 21, 2026!
Black Studies on 135th Street
Edited by Barrye Brown, Laura E. Helton, and Vanessa K. Valdés
A centennial celebration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its vital role in the development of Black Studies
In 1926, the Afro–Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg’s collection of four thousand books, pamphlets, papers, and prints arrived at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. The collection contained works in many languages and formats, offering an unparalleled look into the richness and global reach of Black history. One hundred years later, Schomburg’s collection remains a central feature of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, now the world’s premier archive for study of the African diaspora, housing more than 11 million items, and a vibrant site of Black intellectual life.
This volume not only contextualizes the life and work of Schomburg and chronicles the history of the institution that bears his name but also includes a list of books and pamphlets in Schomburg’s initial “seed collection,” the fruit of a multiyear research effort to reconstruct this early Black Studies archive. Framing this list are essays and reflections written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars on the development of the Black intellectual tradition, both in Schomburg’s time and today.
Scattered & Fugitive Things
Published April 16, 2024
Winner of the Mercantile Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America
Winner of the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the Eliza Atkins Gleason Award from the American Library Association
Winner of the Arline Custer Memorial Book Prize from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Finalist, 2025 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Named one of the Best Black History Books of 2024 by Black Perspectives
During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.
Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south.
In this book, I chronicle the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, I reveal the risks collectors took to create Black archives. I also explore the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility.