Dr. Michelle D. Commander is Deputy Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and a scholar of slavery and memory, Black geographies and mobility, and the speculative arts.
Commander previously served as Deputy Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Associate Director and Curator of the Schomburg Center’s Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. For eight years, Commander was a professor in the Department of English and Program in Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, where she received promotion and tenure to associate professor and earned awards for teaching and other efforts across campus. Commander has also been a high school teacher and an instructor at Florida A&M University, Florida State University, and the University of Ghana.
Commander received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California; M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction from Florida State University; and a B.A. in English from Charleston Southern University. She is a recipient of prestigious research fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Scholar Program. Commander is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.
She is the author of numerous academic and public-facing articles. Commander’s books include Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017) and Avidly Reads: Passages (NYU Press, 2021). She is the editor of the anthology Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition (Penguin, 2021).
Commander is the Consulting Curator for a new period room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Before Yesterday We Could Fly, which opened in November 2021 and is currently on view.
She is at work on Seizing Black Space, a book-length project on Black mobility and slavery’s geographical afterlives that is under contract with Viking Books.
