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.

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,” viewed by thousands of visitors over its three-month run in 2017, and, opening in 2022, “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 in the changing stewardship and status of archives. Her scholarship has appeared in TDR and African American Literature in Transition: 1940–1950, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.