I’m sorry to have to miss the @moderniststudies.bsky.social convening this year, but I’m incredibly honored to be in such good company on this shortlist for the 2025 MSA First Book Prize!

GET YOUR CALENDAR OUT 🗓️ and write these two dates down…

10/16, 2p ET USA: Dorothy Berry’s (@dorothyjberry.bsky.social) The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities available for purchase. The first 50 copies sold will be signed 🫢 www.weherepress.org

My reading list just got much longer . . .

ACLS has released a statement regarding the White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”: bit.ly/3IviMig

"No institution that is committed to the free pursuit of knowledge should submit to the degradation of autonomy and academic freedom contained in it." @acls1919.bsky.social statement on the White House "compact" proposed to universities. www.acls.org/news/acls-st...

This is real.

Yall please go watch @merriam-webster.com’s new AI ad😅

youtu.be/RvQnl3O0D3c?...

Important thread on what came out in the AAUP vs. Rubio case.

Bibliographical Mysteries! "Share your successes and failures, cold cases, breakthroughs, speculative practices, novel uses of technology, collaborative momentum, and other stories."
CFP *by 10.7* for a special session of @bibsocamer.bsky.social annual meeting. bibsocamer.org/news/cfp-bsa26

Happy 195th birthday to the Colored Conventions movement!

The first convention debated whether this country would ever be a place for Black people to enjoy their full civil rights and citizenship. As those fights continue today, it is powerful reading omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/70

Next month a new collection of Pat Parker’s crucial work—edited by yours truly—will be published. Essential Poems by Pat Parker features some of her most beloved writing. Available wherever you buy books. Still feeling so chuffed after receiving my copies!!!

'Instead, the trans past can be a tool for imagining how we might build liveable trans lives in community, outside of and without reference to the state and other institutions— and perhaps even in the face of, and in active resistance to, state violence and repression.'

🚨I've been timid to announce the exhibition "Weaving Dreams" which centers my #quilts as well as work by my Mom and alumna Carter Watson. The opening on 10/3 features an excerpt of the choreopoem, PURPLE, by SLMDances w/a talkback. Pls RSVP by 9/29 library.barnard.edu/events/weavi...

‘Citizen historians' are documenting the Smithsonian to track historical erasure over time. www.capeandislands.org/2025-09-22/w... If you visit the Smithsonian, particularly the NMAAHC, take and share pictures.

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

📝Reviewed in PBSA: Laura E. Helton's book, Scattered and Fugitive Things 📖

Read Melissa Barton's full review in the June 2025 issue of PBSA. Link in Bio 🔗

🔎 DOI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/735894

#BookReview #Bibliography

Excited to finally announce the release of my first ever book, and the first ever book from we here press. It is a pocket-size guide to my archival theories and experiences in the form of essays- some you may have heard in part as lectures, some which are unpublished until now.

www.weherepress.org

I debated writing this. It can feel tempting, upon encountering yet another instance of this administration’s racism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet we have to write it down, if for nothing else, so those who come after us know we were against it.

The gradual inclusion of truth about the experience of slavery in American museums has been one of the most deeply researched and considered and consequential developments in public history over the last half century. Enraging we have to defend it in this way.

Been thinking about this for days. So many recent re-examinations of our history have been made possible through archives held in Black cultural institutions. Cuts aren't only about erasing the past but undermining the potential to grapple with who we are as a nation in the present and future

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ.
The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

I've seen some talk about how we are witnessing the end of the professoriate as we know it and this may be true, but I think it's bigger: it's the decimation of the mission-oriented profession.

Want to make a middle-class living serving the public good? Capitalism doesn't want that for you.

We are pleased to announce that Laura Helton's SCATTERED AND FUGITIVE THINGS is awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2025 S-USIH Annual Book Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. buff.ly/Q3rYHuJ #AwardWinner #Archive #BlackHistory @lehelton.bsky.social @susih.bsky.social