Research Institute

2012-2013

Beyond Representation: an Interdisciplinary Approach to the Nature of Things

Thursday, September 27, 2012
Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010

Monday, October 15, 2012

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

Playing with Modernism: Historical Perspectives on Children and Design

Friday, November 16, 2012
Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

Keynote Lecture: Hoentschel in Context

Thursday, April 18, 2013
Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

Hoentschel in Context

Friday, April 19, 2013
Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

Kitchen and Table in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America

Monday, April 29, 2013
Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street

 

2011-2012

 

Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, After-Lives

 

2010-2011

Perspectives on the Liao 

Yale University, New Haven - Bard Graduate Center, New York City

The Cisneros Seminar in the Material Cultures of the Iberoamerican World:The Study of Material Culture in 18th and 19th Century Mexico, Peru and Argentina

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY

Mapping New Media

Friday, March 25, 2011
1:30 pm–5:30 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY

Objects of Exchange:
Social and Material Transformation on the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast

Friday, April 1, 2011
1:30 am–6:30 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY

Ex Voto: Votive Images Across Cultures

9:30 am–7:00 pm
Friday, April 29, 2011

9:30 am–2:00 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY

 

2009-2010

Symposium: Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick

Monday, October 19, 2009
2:00 pm–5:30 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY
RSVP required to academic-events@bgc.bard.edu or 212 501 3019

Presented in conjunction with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery and celebrating the lasting legacy of Dutch culture in New York, this exhibition (and catalogue) explore(s) the world of a fascinating woman, her family, and the possessions she accumulated over an eventful lifetime. Margrieta van Varick was born in 1649 in the Netherlands, but she spent many years at the extremes of the Dutch world–in Malacca on the Malay Peninsula and in Flatbush, now part of Brooklyn. She arrived in New York in 1686 with her husband, a Dutch Reformed minister, and set up a textile shop, bringing with her an array of objects from the Far East and Europe. Her shop goods, along with her household furnishings, were meticulously recorded in an estate inventory made after her death in 1695. The inventory lay forgotten for more than two hundred years but was rediscovered in the twentieth century, pointing the way to new research into the histories of New York City, the Dutch overseas trading empire, women, and material culture. Although to date it has been impossible to link specific objects to the items in Margrieta's inventory, representative objects serve as springboards to discussions by a group of more than thirty leading curators and scholars. The intense investigation of the past by this wide group of scholars holds up a mirror to present-day New York and serves as a reminder of a vanished world.

Schedule of events

For additional information contact Alex Phelan, phelan@bgc.bard.edu.

Symposium: Thalassography and Historiography

Monday, October 19
6:00 pm–8:00 pm 
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
9:00 am–5:00 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY
RSVP required to academic-events@bgc.bard.edu or 212 501 3019

This two-day symposium will bring together scholars of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean, China, and Black Seas, to address the following question: "Has or does–a thalassographic frame open up methodological and historiographical questions or horizons that have been–or will be–important for new ways of studying the human past?"

Schedule of events

For additional information contact Alex Phelan, phelan@bgc.bard.edu.

Cultural Histories of the Material World Launch

Thursday, April 15 and Friday April 16, 2010

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY
RSVP required to academic-events@bgc.bard.edu or 212 501 3019

This meeting marks the public launch of Cultural Histories of the Material World, a book series edited at the BGC and published by the University of Michigan Press. The series will encourage digital scholarship by hosting extensive and even relatively free-standing digital complements to the print materials. Speakers include: Glenn Adamson, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Jonathan Bloom, Philippe Bordes, Horst Bredekamp, Bill Brown, Ronnie Ellenblum, Ivan Gaskell, Robert E. Harrist Jr., Bernard L. Herman, Sabine MacCormack, Ruth Phillips, Alain Schnapp, Elaine Sisman, Pamela Smith, and Nancy Troy. The essays presented here will be published as the first volume in the new series.

For additional information contact Alex Phelan, phelan@bgc.bard.edu.

Symposium: The Artifact in the Age of New Media

Friday, February 5, 2010
9:00 am–5:00 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY
RSVP required to academic-events@bgc.bard.edu or 212 501 3019

New media has transformed our access to collections in the humanities.  But how has our interpretation and presentation of artifacts changed?  This day-long symposium will feature presentations by leading practitioners in the university, library, and museum worlds to showcase new developments in this rapidly changing field.  We will be discussing such topics as the nature of digital collaborations within and between institutions, what digital scholarship involving material culture looks like and will look like, the role of digital media in the training of material culture/art history scholars, and digital media and the changing nature of exhibitions, among other issues.

For additional information contact Alex Phelan, phelan@bgc.bard.edu.

Symposium: Secondhand Culture: Waste, Value, and Materiality

Thursday, April 15
5:00 pm–8:00 pm
Friday April 16, 2010
9:00 am–4:00 pm

Lecture Hall, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY
RSVP required to academic-events@bgc.bard.edu or 212 501 3019

Secondhand Culture:Waste, Value, and Materiality explores the ways in which objects ranging from clothing to collectibles to trash have been constructed and experienced. Scholars of Theater, History, Geography, and Art and Design History discuss this vital new area at the intersection of consumerism, material culture studies, cultural geography, and artmaking.

Schedule of events

For additional information contact Alex Phelan, phelan@bgc.bard.edu.