Melissa Barton

Melissa Barton is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, at Beinecke Library. She received her BA in English from Yale and her PhD, also in English, from the University of Chicago. While at the University of Chicago, Melissa was a staff member of Mapping the Stacks, a project founded by Jacqueline Goldsby to create descriptive guides to collections on the south side of Chicago. Melissa also holds a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) from National-Louis University and taught in the Chicago Public Schools.

At the Beinecke, Melissa has curated exhibits including “Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage,” “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen,” “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and the Beinecke Library,” and “Brava! Women Make American Theater.” Her catalog Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album was copublished by the Beinecke and Yale University Press.

Melissa writes and presents frequently about teaching with collections. Her own research focuses on histories of Black theater and performance, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, and on the changing stewardship, status, and conception of archives and “the archive.” Her scholarship has appeared in TDR and African American Literature in Transition: 1940–1950, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.