Research at BGC

"Cultural Sciences" ( Kulturwissenschaften ) was how the university world circa 1900 tried to describe the anticipated convergence of inquiries into art, society, economy, history, and religion. New fields such as archaeology, sociology and anthropology, and new approaches such as those represented by economic history and art history, held out the prospect of new ways of understanding the world humans made and make-Cultura in the strong sense.

The collapse of the German-speaking academic world by 1933 terminated this project, though the idea that only an interdisciplinary approach of some sort could be equal to the complexity of modern life lay behind the post-war vogue for a variety of neologisms: sciences humaines, social sciences, cultural history, cultural studies.

At the BGC we have gone back instead to "Cultural Sciences" because of its connection to the best model for what we aspire to achieve. Aby Warburg's Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Cultural Sciences Library), established in Hamburg in the first decade of the twentieth century, brought together art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of religion and literary scholars in an unprecedented collaboration. His death in 1929 interrupted the momentum of his use of material evidence for understanding cultural history. Even the formation of the Annales d'histoire économique (Annals of Economic History) by the great historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in that same year of 1929 and despite their keen sensitivity to both material and cultural history, did not succeed at keeping this vision alive.

The founding of the Bard Graduate Center in the fall of 1993, with its question-driven rather than discipline-driven approach offers the possibility of recapturing this initiative. There is finally an institutional home for the study of the material past as a key for understanding the human creation of culture. The Cultural Sciences today are driven by the power of museums and museum culture and so this program here is closely linked with our field area "History and Theory of Museums."