Elizabeth Koehn is a Ph.D. candidate in Design History at the Bard Graduate Center, where she works on material relating to design, architecture, and consumer culture across the 20th century and through to the present. Her ongoing dissertation, Utopian Shores: Visionary Design and its Limits in the 1960s, interrogates and complicates the relationship between Utopia and design by focusing on a selection of case studies from the 1960s in order to map the spatial and temporal boundaries of utopian thought, and examine how these limits inform our understanding of design and its objects. Elizabeth completed her MA at the Bard Graduate Center in 2020 with her qualifying paper Designing Destruction: Archizoom Associati’s “Superonda” Sofa as Radical Critique, in which she examined the formal and material qualities of Archizoom’s 1966/67 seating design in the context of the group’s theoretical projects and essays critiquing the relationship between design and consumerism. Prior to joining the BGC, Elizabeth held positions working with artists at the New York-based galleries Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and David Zwirner after earning her BA in History and Art History from Oberlin College in 2009. Recent teaching appointments include TA’ing BGC’s required Objects in Context course (2021-22), and teaching Design and Culture at SUNY-Purchase College (Spring 2022), which situated contemporary design and its making within existing and emerging theories and debates from the fields of semiotics, cultural studies, anthropology, feminism and gender studies, race studies, disability studies, environmentalism, and speculative futuring. As the recipient of BGC’s 2022-23’s doctoral teaching fellowship, she will be teaching Design and Revolution in 20th Century Europe in fall 2023.