Michelle D. Commander
Michelle D. Commander is a historian and author, and serves as Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Education. Commander received her undergraduate degree at Charleston Southern University and completed graduate studies at Florida State University before completing a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Career. Before joining the Lapidus Center, Commander worked as associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. She serves as faculty for Rare Book School, and is an author at "Ms. Magazine ." Michelle 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. Scholarship. Commander's work focuses on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, literary studies, Afrofuturism, and Black social movements. Her publications include "Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic" (Duke University Press 2017), and "Avidly Reads Passages" (NYU Press 2021). In 2021, she edited "Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition", an anthology of Black history spanning transatlantic slavery to Reconstruction. 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. 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.