Cathleen Lewis

Cathleen Lewis is Curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, specializing in Soviet and Russian history.  Lewis has completed both bachelors and a master’s degrees in Russian and East European Studies at Yale University and completed her PhD in History at the George Washington University.

Her current research project is a reexamination of cosmonaut culture in the last six decades.  She also Studies and curates the histories of astrobiology and blacks in aviation and spaceflight in the United States and abroad.  She has written about artifacts in the Smithsonian’s collection articles comparing the Soviet and American approaches to exhibiting and portraying spaceflight.  She is planning to write a history of the development of spacesuit gloves.