Degree Programs

Dean, and Chair of Academic Programs. BA, Harvard College; MA, Harvard University; PhD, University of Cambridge. Assistant professor, University of Maryland; Mellon instructor, University of Chicago; research fellow, University of Cambridge. Fellowships include John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, and others. General Editor, Cultural Histories of the Material World, a joint venture of BGC and Harvard University Press. Other publications include Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences; Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century; Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Political Writings: Joseph Priestly; The Song of the Soul; Understanding “Poppea” (coauthor); “Nazis And Neo-Stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich Before and After the Second World War,” Past & Present; and numerous other articles and reviews. Conferences organized: “Momigliano and Antiquarianism” (Clark Library, Los Angeles, 2002); “The Age of Antiquaries in Europe and China,” (BGC, 2004 with François Louis); “Thalassography and Historiography” (BGC, 2009); “Cultural Histories of the Material World” (BGC, 2010).

What do you see as recent major accomplishments of the BGC?

Well, as a historian, I would say, let’s look back a bit, first. We could look back to the beginning of the opportunity for the BGC, in the widening gulf between cultural history and material history that sprang up in 1929, with the death of Aby Warburg and the foundation of the Annales d’histoire économique. Or we could look back to a scant fifteen years ago, when the BGC was founded by Susan Weber, with the idea of creating an institution focused on studying the broadest realm of human creativity, not the narrower sort that had been canonized in Vienna and Berlin a hundred years earlier and which, despite a variety of elegant intellectual rebellions along the way, still looked more or less the same. These chronological frames help us measure a tremendous institutional accomplishment.

Looking back just a couple of years, to when I became Chair of the Academic Programs, I’d say that our biggest accomplishment didn’t involve doing anything differently, but rather thinking differently about what we were already doing. Our faculty come at problems of materiality from very different historiographical and methodological premises, from decorative arts, history of painting, architectural history, history of craft, design history, material culture, archaeology, anthropology, social history of art, history of technology and history of scholarship. But everyone’s questions converge on the challenge of trying to understand the meaning of the culture—the human intervention in the natural world—made by our ancestors. That means my job is not imposing a single master narrative, but more akin to connecting the dots, to figuring out where the common is—and that’s the cultural history of the material world.

I’d say, also, that the strength of the institution is, precisely, in that methodological pluralism. That we’ve got so many people thinking about things—more, probably, than any other graduate program in New York City—but doing that thinking in terms of different historiographies, different bibliographies, different cognitive geographies. That diversity makes this a rich eco-system, and one in which every student can find the food and shelter they need to grow. And my feeling is that the unity is of a “second order.” Personally, I think that’s great. Because it means, from a student perspective, that they can come here and plunge deeply into any of half a dozen different approaches and still find themselves in a single conversation that arcs through their classes. If there is a single challenge for our academic program, it is to emphasize these existing links– simply put, to make plain what is already present.

I’m really happy, too, that our idea of a graduate research institute is already bearing fruit. By this I mean a place where graduate teaching is enriched by a vigorous institutional research program embodied in seminars, lectures and symposia, and where those research ventures grow out of the teaching interests and scholarship of faculty. I believe this gives our education a flavor and depth that is hard to reproduce.

As Dean, where do you see things going?

In terms of faculty appointments—the lifeblood of an institution—we are searching this year to fill for a permanent position in “the artistic and material culture of medieval Europe.” We are also looking to fill a position in the Arts of the Islamic World left vacant by Stefano Carboni’s departure to Australia. These two, together, will link François Louis and Elizabeth Simpson, and provide continuous geographical and chronological coverage of Asia from the ancient world to the early modern. Having Aaron Glass, our BGC/AMNH post-doctoral fellow gives us a staffed opening to pre-Columbia or Native Peoples that we’ve never had before, and we value this strongly.

Our Cultural Sciences Campus will also provide opportunities here in New York, and overseas, that we can only begin to imagine. Already we can point to exhibition collaborations, publications, fellowships, symposia. In the future we hope to add, with our overseas partners, also faculty and student exchanges. These will help us contintually sharpen our ideas and keep all of us doing work that is interesting, not just feasible or fashionable.

But I think the BGC also has the opportunity to redefine scholarship in our field, and thus the field itself, in two very different ways. First of all, next year we will open a Study Gallery in our gallery building at 18 West 86th Street. The idea here is to create a context for exhibitions of a few objects, with ample didactic material and intended—I think this is the key—as instruments of argumentation. Our hope, really, is to create a new kind of research vehicle in which professors will plan a research seminar so as to “output” not to a journal article, but an exhibition. We, in turn, will provide curatorial, design and in-house publication support, so that the professor’s article can be the main catalogue essay, but so in different forms can the student papers. And, in the subsequent planning and design stage students will be able to participate in the process and help make the exhibition happen.

A second exciting opening for Fall 2009 is our new New Media Lab. We all know that museums are heavy on didactic video. We also all are aware that computer assisted design offers untold possibilities for creating—and recreating—space. Bringing them together in an academic context means that our courses in History & Theory of Museums and history of collecting can take advantage of these technologies to do work that can’t be done now. I leave aside the practical, even vocational, benefits to students. But we we will be able to launch research projects and study objects in all sorts of new ways because of these tools.

In short, what I am excited about in the near future, is our opportunity to create new forms of research, to ask new kind of questions and open doors into new arenas of the human past. That is exciting!