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Histories of design education in the United States are often situated within the paradigm of the Bauhaus diaspora, and by extension, its adjacency to architectural education. While émigré designers from Europe exerted significant influence in the formation of design education in the mid-twentieth-century U.S., this session aims to highlight scholarship that takes other actors, networks, and institutions as its primary subjects, elucidating lesser-known episodes in the training and professionalization of American designers. We invite submissions that provide case studies or historiographic analyses of themes that might include (but are not limited to): What are the uniquely American conditions that have shaped the definitions and structures of design education? How did early industrial-art vocational training, immigrant craft-based education, and applied arts training for a manufacturing nation play a role in the political, social and cultural spheres of American life and identity? What are the formative relationships between industry, business, and education? What ideas animated the pedagogical discourse among educators and influential makers in the latter half of the 20th century? Beyond the biographical, what modes of analysis are best-suited to trace the dispersal and diffusion of ideologies and practices of design education through networks of institutions or individual educators? And how might the specific material conditions and methods of student work offer insights into the shifting conceptual and technological bases of American design? Papers in this this session will help recover the historical contexts and intellectual development of design education beyond the well-trod territory of European modernist influences.