Colin Fanning’s research encompasses a broad range of American and European design, craft, and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His dissertation engages the history of design pedagogy in the late-twentieth-century United States; other work has concerned the material culture of childhood, intersections between design and fossil fuel in Victorian Britain, and the visual and material cultures of spaceflight. Fanning has held positions at the Museum of Arts and Design, the American Federation of Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he is currently Assistant Curator in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture. Focusing primarily on modern and contemporary design, he has curated and co-curated PMA exhibitions including The Architecture of Francis Kéré: Building for Community (2016); Design Currents: Oki Sato, Faye Toogood, Zanini de Zanine (2016–17); Channeling Nature by Design (2017); and Dieter Rams: Principled Design (2018–19). He was also a consulting curator for Designs for Different Futures (2019–20), organized in partnership between the PMA, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.