| Into the Archives | <p><strong>Laura Helton</strong> specializes in American literature and history of
the twentieth century, with an emphasis on African American print culture and
public humanities. Her research and teaching interests include archival
studies, memory and material culture, gender and sexuality, and literary
practices of the black freedom struggle. Her current book project, <em>Collecting
and Collectivity: Black Archival Publics, 1900-1950</em>, examines the emergence
of African American archives and libraries to show how historical recuperation
shaped forms of racial imagination in the early twentieth century. Professor
Helton is co-editor of a special issue of <em>Social Text</em>on "The
Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive," and her work on
the Howard University curator Dorothy Porter is forthcoming in <em>PMLA.</em>She
has held fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American
and African Studies at the University of Virginia (2013-2015) and at the Center
for Humanities & Information at Penn State (2015-2017). In 2016, she was
awarded the Zuckerman Prize in American Studies from the University of
Pennsylvania, awarded for the best dissertation connecting American history to
literature or art in any period. 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 for Research in Black Culture. She
has also worked with arts organizations as a grant writer and curator. She holds a B.A. in
Anthropology, Barnard College; an M.A. History, New York University; an M.L.I.S. Library & Information Studies, Rutgers University; and a Ph.D.
History, New York University. </p><p> </p><p> </p> | | | | <p>“Into the Archives” is a pair of courses that introduce students to archival practice and theorythrough immersion in African American collections at the University of Delaware and beyond.The undergraduate course, “Into the Archives: The Ephemeral Langston Hughes” beginswith one literary figure—the poet, playwright, and activist Langston Hughes—to ask studentswhat it means not only to archive, but also to think, write, and act archivally. The companion graduate seminar in theory and methods, “Archives Theory,” will take up a related set of questions about the construction of the archive, giving students a toolkit of theory,keywords, and practices to support their independent work in the field of public humanities.</p> | <p>Course exhibition catalog the students edited after the Into the Archives class on Langston Hughes <a href="/Rotator%20PDFs/Catalog_final.pdf">Catalog_final.pdf</a><br></p><p><br></p> | lehelton | | |
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