Laura Helton, who holds a joint appointment in the Departments of English and History at the University of Delaware, specializes in African American print culture, archival studies and public humanities. Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores the emergence of African American archives and libraries to show how historical recuperation shaped forms of racial imagination in the early twentieth century. This book received the Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America, the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award from the American Library Association.