Michelle D. Commander is a historian and author, and serves as Deputy Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.^[1][2]

Education

Commander received her BA in English from Charleston Southern University and completed a M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction at Florida State University before completing a MA and PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.^[3]

Career

Before joining the Lapidus Center, Commander worked as associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee.^[4] She serves as faculty for Rare Book School,^[5] and is an author at Ms. Magazine.^[2]

Commander served as consulting curator and literary scholar for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Afrofuturism period room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, which opened in November 2021.^[6][7][8]

Scholarship

Commander's work focuses on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, literary studies, Afrofuturism, and Black social movements.^[3] Her publications include Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press 2017), and Avidly Reads Passages (NYU Press 2021). She is editor of Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, an anthology of Black history spanning transatlantic slavery to Reconstruction.^[9] Her focus on Black mobility, slavery, diasporic longing and speculative futures is evident in her influence on Before Yesterday We Could Fly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[10][11]

Awards

Commander is a Ford Foundation scholar and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant which funded teaching and research in Ghana in 2012-2013.^[4][12]