Meet Scholar Bess Williamson

Bess Williamson is completing her Baird Society resident scholar study at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library this week. Bess is a Ph.D student in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. She holds a B.A. in History from Brown University, an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from the Parsons School of Design, and an M.A. in History from the University of Delaware.

Bess, having been in the Parsons program at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is very familiar with the library’s resources. Her research topic, entitled “The Right to Design: Disability and Access in the United States, 1945-1990” explores how the issue of disability has changed American material life in the last half of the twentieth century. Bess began her Smithsonian Fellowship researching documents and artifacts on products for the disabled (wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs and other artifacts) primarily at the National Museum of American History’s (NMAH) division of Medicine and Science. She also used the library and archive at NMAH to review trade literature and also research social ideas and attitudes toward about disability.

 At the Cooper-Hewitt, she studied the designs and writings of notable industrial designers Don Wallance and Henry Dreyfuss who both made significant contributions to the study of ergonomics (scientific discipline concerned with designing according to human needs).

Bess will return to the University of Delaware in the fall to complete her doctoral studies after researching the medical archives at the University of California at Berkeley this summer.—Elizabeth Broman and Stephen Van Dyk