From her corner office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., Michelle Commander ’10 can see the White House, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

“Those monuments remind me of the significance of this work — not just for African American history and culture, but for the nation as a whole,” says Commander, who has served as the museum’s deputy director since 2023.

“Telling these stories helps bring us together in greater unity. We may be the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but these are human stories. If you ever loved anyone, if you’ve ever cared about your neighbor, you can find yourself here.”

A Stroller among the Wheelchairs

Shortly after its 2016 opening, Commander brought her 1-year-old son to the museum. Weeks beforehand, she had stayed up until midnight to secure tickets amid overwhelming demand. Inside, surrounded by visitors, she was struck by the number of elderly guests, many in wheelchairs.

“This was clearly a lifelong dream for them,” she says. “I could only imagine all the things those elders had been through. They needed to see this place with their own eyes — it probably felt almost like a miracle.”

The moment crystallized her sense of the museum, not solely as a place to preserve history but as a living institution.

Commander, who earned her PhD in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife in 2010, acknowledges that the museum experience can be emotionally heavy, especially in galleries depicting the brutal conditions of the Middle Passage. “But as visitors move through the space, they also encounter resilience, creativity and progress,” she says. Among the diverse and iconic exhibits on display are the silk and lace shawl given to abolitionist Harriet Tubman by Queen Victoria, a guard tower from the notorious Louisiana prison known as Angola, and Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac convertible.

“Ultimately, I hope people leave with a fuller understanding of both struggle and triumph — and a sense of shared humanity,” Commander says of the beloved museum, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

That mission of inclusivity extends to all audiences, from school groups to programs for visitors with dementia. The goal, she says, is simple: to help every visitor — the museum has welcomed more than 13 million since opening — find their place within a fuller American story.

Southern Roots

Commander’s own story began far from the nation’s capital.

“Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in Eastover, South Carolina, which is about as small as it sounds — no traffic lights, a railroad running through town,” Commander says. “It was a great childhood, rooted in a rural environment and in religion.”

Her grandmother was a Pentecostal evangelist, and church shaped much of Commander’s early life. Her mother was a factory worker, as was her stepfather, who also served in the National Guard. At home, both parents modeled discipline and curiosity.

“We lived a middle-class lifestyle, and my parents worked very hard doing shift work. But every afternoon, they came home and read the newspaper.”

Indeed, the newspaper was accorded a position in the household that was almost sacrosanct. “They’d say, ‘You can look at the comics, but don’t touch the rest until we’ve read it.’” Commander absorbed that reverence for the printed word, becoming an avid reader.

“I’d go to the library and check out huge stacks of books. During the summer, I’d read a novel a day, from sunup to sundown.”

A curious child, Commander was academically advanced, often working a grade ahead. When she wasn’t reading, she visited history museums with her family or played the clarinet, both soprano and bass. Her musical talent later earned her a partial college scholarship.

She also became interested in writing, winning an award in high school for an essay challenging the media’s negative portrayal of the school.

“Writing helped me find my voice and develop my own perspective. I wasn’t just articulating what my parents or teachers may have told me, but something that came from my own heart, my own thoughts.”

Finding Her Intellectual Compass

Commander initially set out to become an English teacher, attending Charleston Southern University in South Carolina. She then earned a master’s degree in English education at Florida State University where she excelled academically and gained teaching experience, both there and at Florida A&M University.

She found the experience transformative. “It showed me that advanced degrees were possible for someone like me.”

However, when she began her doctorate at Florida State — effectively building her own course of study from humanities classes in American and African American studies — she realized she needed a stronger foundation.

“I felt that something was missing, that I didn’t quite have the full background that I needed to do what I wanted to do as a professor,” she says. Encouraged by mentors, she chose to start over in graduate school in pursuit of more rigorous interdisciplinary training — even if it meant redoing the first two years of her doctorate.

That decision led her to USC Dornsife, where she was accepted into the newly established American Studies and Ethnicity program.

“When I visited USC, I knew within the first hour that it was the right place for me,” she says. “The faculty were incredible.”

The program pushed her beyond her comfort zone, demanding that she grapple each week with dense theoretical texts across multiple fields in preparation for challenging, discussion-driven seminars.

“It was a very tough program. It pushed me in ways I didn’t know that I could be pushed,” says Commander. That rigor reshaped her worldview, training her to think expansively across histories, cultures and borders.

Tides of Belonging

Commander traces the roots of that global perspective back to a formative trip to Ghana she took at the beginning of her doctoral studies at USC Dornsife. Initially researching transnational feminism, she was struck by an unexpected sense of belonging and began interviewing African Americans traveling or resettling abroad — people who, like her, were searching for connection and identity beyond the United States. That inquiry grew into another transnational project — one that took her to Ghana and Brazil to research the motivations and experiences of African diasporic return.

In 2012, a Fulbright fellowship brought her back to West Africa to teach at the University of Ghana, an experience she describes as “life-changing, both personally and intellectually.”

Teaching works of African American and diasporic literature such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in classrooms not far from coastal slave forts, she found herself bridging histories and communities. As a result, Commander began to see her scholarship less as purely academic and more as a form of public translation. That perspective culminated in her first book, Afro-Atlantic Flight, and continues to shape her leadership.

Classroom to Community

Commander imagined a traditional academic career. But after being awarded tenure as a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee in 2016, she began questioning the reach of her work. While recognized for her teaching and commitment to campus-wide leadership, she sought broader impact and turned increasingly toward public scholarship — organizing community reading programs, serving on arts and literacy boards and facilitating nonpartisan, public conversations about race, gender and class.

That commitment to public engagement led her to New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the nation’s leading institutions for the preservation of Black history. Housed in the former Harlem Public Library, the center holds 11 million objects preserving African American history. As associate director and curator and later as deputy director of research and strategic initiatives, Commander helped shape educational programming, exhibitions, acquisitions and strategy for nearly five years.

“Then the job came up here,” she says of the Smithsonian museum. “How could I resist?”

A Global Perspective

Today, charged with telling the unvarnished story of African American history, Commander moves between scholarship, public engagement, fundraising and national and international collaborations — sometimes all in one day. She approaches the museum not simply as a cultural institution, but as a space where local and global histories converge.

“Experiencing graduate education at USC Dornsife expanded my worldview,” she says. “It set me up for a job like this one, where we’re on not just a national, but an international, stage.”

That global perspective, she notes, was shaped by a path she never envisioned.

“My journey wasn’t linear. I learned to say ‘yes’ to opportunities, even when they were uncertain. That openness shaped my career.”

Asked what she is most proud of, her answer is simple: “That I didn’t give up.”

Preserving Truth

For Commander, scholarship remains the foundation of museum work.

“Everything we present is research-based and evidence-driven,” she says. “Museums translate scholarship for the public and we produce scholarship ourselves.”

Commander has helped expand the museum’s publications program to reach all ages, from children’s books to art catalogs, writing and editing some of these works herself. Regardless of format or audience, the work is anchored in the same questions that continue to drive her research: What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be free? How do people create a sense of home despite uncertainty?

“I’m deeply curious about the past — what people experienced, what made them laugh, what they valued,” she says. “Those stories shape us today.”

From her office overlooking the nation’s monuments, that realization feels particularly prescient.

“Preserving the nation’s history as accurately as we can is essential,” she says. “We’ve come this far together as a nation. Understanding our past helps us navigate the present so we can build a better future.”