Michelle Jackson-Beckett, PhD, is Curator of Rare Books at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Library. She is a specialist in modern design and architecture of Central Europe and the United States. She holds a PhD in Design History, Decorative Arts & Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, an MA from the Cooper Hewitt Museum/Parsons School of Design program in the History of Decorative Arts & Design, and a BA in German Language & Literature from Saint Joseph’s University.

Michelle works on curatorial research and exhibitions, acquisitions, collection management, scholarly publications, and reference inquiries related to rare and distinctive collections at Cooper Hewitt Library, collaborating with colleagues at the Cooper Hewitt Museum and Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. She enjoys activating special collections for a wider audience through exhibitions, publishing, tours, and classes. Her research interests include modern interiors, industrial design, graphic design, émigré architects & designers, and design exhibitions. Her monograph with Oxford University Press, Vienna and the New Wohnkultur, 1918-1938, explores the history of interior design exhibitions held in interwar Vienna and progressive ideas of affordable design, spatial psychology, and early theories of user experience.

Michelle brings more than a decade of experience in design history, academic research libraries and archives, and special collections to her role. Prior to joining Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, she was Curator of Drawings & Archives at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library; Senior Lecturer in Design History & Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and archivist for the Victor J. Papanek Foundation Archive and Library; and Director of Archives & Publications at R & Company design gallery in Manhattan. She has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of design, architecture, and material culture, at Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design, with research and teaching topics ranging across Weimar modernism, revivalism in design, the material culture of waste, postmodern architecture and design, industrial design history, environmental design, and world history of glass and glassmaking.

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