Laura Helton

Laura Helton is an Associate Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment in both departments. She specializes in American literature, African American print culture, and public humanities, focusing on archival studies, material texts, race and memory, gender and sexuality, and the literary history of social movements. Her seminal work, *Scattered and Fugitive Things*, examines how Black collectors shaped early 20th-century archives and redefined racial historiography.

Helton’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Schomburg Center, NEH, and the Bibliographical Society of America. She co-edited a 2021 *African American Review* special issue on Arturo Schomburg and collaborates on the digital project *Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg* with Fisk University and the Schomburg Center. Her 2019 article *On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading* won major awards from the American Library Association and African American Intellectual History Society.

Prior to academia, she worked as an archivist, processing civil rights-era collections for institutions like the Mississippi Digital Library and Tamiment Library. She also served as a grant writer and curator for arts organizations. Her work bridges archival practice, literary scholarship, and social justice.