avg_rating: 4.59
name: Michelle D. Commander
about: Michelle D. Commander is associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Commander's research has centered on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, heritage tourism, literary studies, and Black social movements. Her first book Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017) examines historic and contemporary Black American journeys toward imagined “Africas” in Bahia, Brazil, Ghana, and the U.S. South. Commander was awarded a Fulbright Teaching/Research grant to Ghana in 2012-2013 and she is a Ford Foundation scho Michelle D. Commander is associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Commander's research has centered on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, heritage tourism, literary studies, and Black social movements. Her first book Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017) examines historic and contemporary Black American journeys toward imagined “Africas” in Bahia, Brazil, Ghana, and the U.S. South. Commander was awarded a Fulbright Teaching/Research grant to Ghana in 2012-2013 and she is a Ford Foundation scholar. Before joining the Schomburg Center, Commander served as a tenured associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A native of the midlands of South Carolina, she will publish Avidly Reads: Passages, a memoir on mobility and slavery’s afterlives in Lower Richland County, South Carolina, in February 2021. ...more