Degree Programs

At the Bard Graduate Center our focus is on Cultura. This ancient Latin word referred to the class of activities in which human beings acted on, and so transformed, their natural surroundings. Studying the traces of this effort describes the task of a specific form of cultural history. Our graduate courses, research projects, and exhibitions direct attention to the substances intervened upon, the processes used to make these interventions, and the consequences of these interventions for the lives of human actors.

Our commitment to studying the material world looks to the past—the historical vision of Aby Warburg, Marc Bloch, and Lucien Febvre—but is geared to the future needs of professors and curators. Our graduate program reflects an encyclopedic approach to the material world, drawing on methodologies and approaches from art and design history, economic and cultural history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology.

Course offerings range across topics elsewhere associated with the Decorative Arts or Design History or Material Culture. At the BGC we uphold no such clear-cut, but ultimately illusory, distinctions. Just as our professors' research traces an inter-disciplinary trajectory, so do the courses they teach.

History and Theory of Museums is central to our intellectual project. We aim as much as possible to integrate the classroom and the gallery so that our goal of combining the object-centered vision of the curator with the question-driven horizon of the university professor can operate on two levels: through classroom content and through hands-on experience.

A key expression of this inter-disciplinary and multi-media project is the Cultural Sciences Campus: our institutional collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and American Museum of Natural History. Launched in 2007, it heralds the possibility of a new way of thinking about cultural histories of the material world.

Research at the BGC is bound up with teaching and learning. The Research Department sponsors fellowships and a wide range of seminars, lectures, and symposia. There is a monthly faculty work-in-progress series, and there is active support for student research and symposia. All these events are designed to function in a kind of polyphony with its courses. A regular peril of small fields and small institutions is in being too comfortable, and in setting standards that are too easily met. By bringing in interesting scholars from across the world of learning who ask questions that we have not posed, about things that we do not study, the BGC insures that its students’ horizons are as broad as possible and their standard of excellence as high as possible.

Hands-on examination of objects is an essential feature of study at the BGC. Incorporated into the first-year Survey of the Decorative Arts and Design course are two trips to places where things are made so that students can experience materiality from the maker’s perspective. Our award-winning exhibition program allows students to learn about a range of artifacts and meanings, as well as better understand how exhibitions and galleries function. “Scholars' Days” and "Installation Workshops" in the gallery bring together professors, students, curators, and connoisseurs in an informal but rigorous context, and thus serve as a model for the kind of intellectual profile we believe in.