Laura Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Dr. Laura Helton, a historian who writes about collections and how they shape our world. She is 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 interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist. 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 writing chronicles the emergence of African diasporic archives in the United States and, more broadly, asks how information practices–material acts of collecting, collation, and cataloging–scaffold literary and historical thought. Her first book, the topic of this discussion, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, was published by Columbia University Press in April 2024. It won the Arline Custer Memorial Book Prize from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and was a finalist for the 2025 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In this conversation, we discuss the stories of Black collectors and the social life of collecting. Helton showcase Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.