Initiatives
Alongside of the Seminar Series and Symposia, the BGC has established several long-term relationships designed to create spheres in which institutional and individual collaborative projects could be undertaken.
Our Cultural Sciences Campus connects the BGC with leading global institutions in our neighborhood: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, American Museum of Natural History, and Frick Collection. The Consortium for American Material Culture was created by the as a think tank for discussing the practice and future of material culture studies. The Trehan Research Fund in Arts of the Islamic World was established by a gift of Ravi and Seran Trehan in 2007 and sponsors lectures, seminars and panel discussions.
The BGC also sponsors a journal, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published in spring 2011, and a monograph series, Cultural Histories of the Material World, with the University of Michigan Press, starting in 2011.
The Bard Graduate Center will be hosting an NEH Summer Institute for College Teachers for four weeks in July of 2011. The topic is American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York. With leading practitioners from the multi-disciplinary material culture field as its faculty, the institute will focus on nineteenth-century artifactual materials with an emphasis on New York City as a national center for fashioning cultural commodities and promoting consumer tastes.
A fellowship program, including a stipendiary post-doctoral fellow and non-stipendiary Visiting Scholars, represents a vision of the BGC as a research community.
Giving students an opportunity to create their own research culture is very important, and is reflected in our generous support of student research and travel, as well as an annual graduate student symposium.
Back to top
