Bess Williamson, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Bess Williamson is Associate Professor of Design Studies at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on inequities in design, particularly the history of disability access and lack of access in modern architecture and industrial design. Her book Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (NYU Press, 2019) was one of the first to document the historical development of accessible design in the United States from 1945 to today. She is also co-editor, with Elizabeth Guffey, of Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is now at work on a history of neurodivergent access and the design workers who contributed to sensory and tactile environments of the late 20^th/early 21^st centuries. At NC State, she honors the legacy of architect Ronald L. Mace and the (former) Center for Universal Design.

In addition to a focus on disability and access, Bess is engaged in making design education more inclusive through work on design artifacts and archives that expand the typical parameters of design history. She is the co-founder of Chicago Designs, a series of workshops that ran in 2022 and 2024 exploring the diverse design archives of Chicago with design and design-adjacent faculty from around the US and beyond (see the work of the 2024 cohort here). She was a part of the Accessible Campus Action Alliance that advocated for COVID policies that centered disabled and chronically ill students and staff, and acts as an advisor to the Remote Access Archive through the Critical Design Lab that documents the networked communications of disabled communities through the 20^th-21^st centuries.

Bess relocated to Raleigh from past work and school experiences in Chicago and Philadelphia. She received her MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from Parsons School of Design and her PhD in History from the University of Delaware.