Michelle D. Commander

Dr. Michelle D. Commander is Deputy Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is an interdisciplinary humanist whose career spans education and academia, libraries and archives, and some of the nation’s most significant cultural institutions. A scholar of Black geographies, cultural memory, and the speculative arts, Commander is dedicated to demonstrating how the humanities—engaged alongside science and emerging technologies—can deepen public understanding and inspire freer futures.

Commander’s path through the humanities is notably expansive. She began her career as a licensed high school educator before moving into university teaching, most recently spending nearly a decade as a professor in the Department of English and Program in Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, where she earned tenure and promotion and received awards from the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences for her excellence in teaching and campus-wide leadership, respectively. Commander also taught a range of courses in American Studies, film, literature, history, and writing at Florida A&M University, Florida State University, and the University of Ghana, nurturing undergraduate and graduate student learners across educational contexts and continents.

Commander’s dedication to public scholarship deepened at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she initially served as the Schomburg Center’s Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center before her promotion to Deputy Director for Research and Strategic Initiatives. During her nearly five-year tenure at the Schomburg Center, Commander advanced initiatives that expanded access to Black archives through public engagement, developed and executed fundraising strategy, curated innovative exhibitions, oversaw the Harriet Tubman Prize, executed the biennial Lapidus Center Conference, published scholarship, led the Education division and its signature programs including the Junior Scholars Program and the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute, fostered new interdisciplinary research, and convened academic fellows and broad audiences alike to engage critically with the historical record.