Home to Harlem: Celebrating Black Bibliography at the Schomburg Center
About this Event
Co-sponsoring organizations:
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Bibliographical Society of America
OVERVIEW
As part of the Schomburg Center’s centennial celebration, this half-day symposium, “Home to Harlem: Celebrating Black Bibliography at the Schomburg Center,” will reflect on the history and future of Black bibliography. Through panel discussions, an open house, and an exhibition tour, this event will provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the Home to Harlem team used material evidence—bookplates, accession numbers, inscriptions, library stamps, card catalogs, and archival documents—to identify items in Arturo Schomburg’s collection. We will also demonstrate ways that researchers can use both the printed bibliography and more than 3,000 enhanced catalog records to explore new topics in global book history and Black intellectual history. Finally, we will reflect together on the field of Black bibliography and why it matters today.
The symposium will include the following activities at the Schomburg Center:
Pop-up display of manuscripts and books collected by Arturo Schomburg & bibliographical tools created by Schomburg Center librarians and curators over the past century
Opening Remarks: “A Bibliographical Tradition on 135th Street” by Barrye Brown and Laura Helton
Panel I: “Behind the Scenes of the Home to Harlem Project: Reconstructing the Library of Arturo Schomburg” with Cheryl Beredo, Miranda Mims, and Matthew Murphy
Panel II: “Black Bibliography, Present and Future Directions” by Jesse Erickson, Jennifer Garcon, and Derrick Spires
Exhibition Tour: “To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library” (Optional)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Space is limited.
ACCESSIBLILITY
Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].
Learn more about To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library here.
Header image: Personal book plate or Arturo “Arthur” Schomburg featuring the Eye of Providence image used by freemasons, as well as an owl with outstretched wings perched atop an open book, flanked by two lamps–all symbols of knowledge and wisdom. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
SPEAKER OVERVIEW
Organizers and Moderators
Barrye Brown is the curator of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She received her BA in history from Dillard University, her MA in history with a focus on Atlantic World/African Diaspora from Rice University, and her MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, as Carolina Academic Library Associate, she held dual appointments in the Southern Historical Collection and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center Library for Black History and Culture. Prior to her tenure at the Schomburg Center, she served as the reference and outreach archivist at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. She is a 2022-2024 Rare Book School-Mellon Cultural Heritage Fellow.
Laura E. Helton is an associate professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. Her research chronicles the emergence of African diasporic archives in the United States and asks how information practices–the work of collecting, curation, and cataloging–shape the literary and historical imagination. Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), won multiple awards, including the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. She has collaborated with the Schomburg Center on many projects, including as part of the Home to Harlem initiative to rediscover Arturo Schomburg’s personal library and as guest curator for “To Uncover and Reveal to the World,” the Schomburg Center’s newest centennial exhibition.
Panelists
“Behind the Scenes of the Home to Harlem Project”
Cheryl Beredo is the Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, she served as Associate Director of Collections and Research Services at the Schomburg Center, where she oversaw the Home to Harlem project from 2018 to 2023.
Miranda Mims co-founded the Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP), an initiative dedicated to fostering relationships and cultivating conversations around preserving legacy, memory, connection, and trust across the African diaspora. She previously served as Director of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation at the University of Rochester, and as an archivist for nearly a decade at the Schomburg Center, where she was part of the beginning of the Home to Harlem project.
Matthew Murphy is a content engineer at Cengage, where he focuses on the creation and management of digital educational resources. At the Schomburg Center, he served as the inaugural rare book cataloger on the Home to Harlem project from 2018 to 2021. His research interests include African American printing and publishing in the nineteenth century, provenance in Black book collections, and the use of image-matching software and computer vision in analytical bibliography.
“Black Bibliography, Past and Future Directions”
Jesse R. Erickson is the Astor Curator and Head of the Department of Printed Books and Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum. He has served as the Vice President for Programs for the American Printing History Association, on the Board of Directors for the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and as co-editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. His research specializations are in ethnobibliography, alternative printing, Black print culture, and the transnational publishing history of the works of Victorian period author Ouida.
Jennifer Garcon is the librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections at Princeton University Library, where she curates, cares for, and stewards twentieth- and twenty-first century rare books, manuscripts, and born-digital material. She has taught courses for Rare Book School, University of Pennsylvania’s Digital Research and Methods Lab, and the Leading Change Institute; and she has led projects in partnership with the Library of Congress, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. She published an essay on Arturo Schomburg’s seed library in Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection (Yale University Press, 2026).
Derrick Spires (pending) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He specializes in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. The book traces how Black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship through a robust print culture, including Black newspapers, the Colored Conventions movement, and other ephemera. Spires’s work on Black print culture, seriality, and Black bibliography has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon/Mays Initiatives, the American Antiquarian Society and other learned societies.
Home to Harlem Project
The Home to Harlem project was a multiyear effort by scholars, archivists, and librarians to identify and enhance access to the original collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Through a decade of meticulous provenance research, the Home to Harlem team reconstructed a nearly complete inventory of the personal library of Arturo Schomburg, whose collection of books, manuscripts, and art turned the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library into a global destination for the study of the African diaspora. To mark the centennial of the 1926 acquisition of Schomburg’s library, Barrye Brown, Laura E. Helton, and Vanessa K. Valdés co-edited , published this year by Yale University Press. The publication features a descriptive bibliography with 3,270 entries and includes information on association and presentation copies that tell the story of Schomburg as a bibliophile and collector. You can purchase a copy from our Schomburg Shop in Harlem and online at schomburgshop.com.
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FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED Events are free and open to all, but due to space constraints registration is requested. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 minutes before start time. After the event starts all registrations are released, so we recommend that you arrive early. We generally overbook to ensure a full house.
ACCESSIBLILITY Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].
E-TRANSPORTATION NYPL policy prohibits electric transportation devices (e.g., motorbikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards) from being brought into or stored at library sites for any length of time, as this is the best way to keep our spaces & people safe.
AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING Programs are photographed by the Schomburg Center. Attending this event indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any all purposes of the New York Public Library.
PRESS Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at [email protected].
Please note that personal and professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.
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