About
Upcoming Exhibitions
BGC Gallery will resume its exhibition programming this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.
Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





Research

Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.

As we enter the third decade of Bard Graduate Center’s Seminar Series, we introduce a major and exciting change: a residency program that extends a visiting scholar’s time at BGC to a full week.

This change was inspired by reflection on things that we have learned from Covid. We realized that Zoom allows us to dramatically expand our community and reach, and we want to maintain the national and international participation it facilitates. At the same time, we recognized that we get so much from face-to-face communication, and that this cannot be commodified.

Scholars-in-residence will present a public lecture, and in addition, present an informal seminar to BGC students and faculty, meet with students, and drop into a relevant course. We are excited about what this will mean for our community. Below is a list of 2021–22 Scholars-in-Residence and information on their public lecture.

2021–22 Scholars-in-Residence

Vera Keller
The Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass
“Hyalomania: Early Modern Glass Research between the Disciplines”

Felipe Gaitan-Ammann
Archaeological Encounters
“Through the Priest’s Ear: An Entangled Story of Life and Death at the Jesuit Church of San Ignacio, 1610–2021”

Ann-Sophie Lehmann
Museum Conversations
“Object Biography: The Life of a Concept”

Hannah Baader
The Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lectures on the Gothic
“Eco-Gothic, Titian, and the Crossing of the Red Sea”

Shamil Jeppie
Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora
“Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Books and Exile in the Sahara”

Claudia Swan
Renaissance and Early Modern Material Culture
“Rarities and Slavery in the Orbit of the Dutch Republic”

Charlotte Vignon
The Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
“Rebuilding the City of Ceramic: Projects for the Renovation of the Sèvres Museum”

Paul Basu
Indigenous Arts in Transition
“Museum Affordances: Colonial Collections, Decolonial Possibilities”

Lothar von Falkenhausen
The Global Middle Ages
“The Current State of Archaeology in China”

Mónica Domínguez Torres
The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture
“Heavenly Pearls: Nature, Religion, and Politics in Habsburg Spain”

Alison J. Clarke
Modern Design History
“Design Anthropology: Industrial Design and the Project of Post-War Development”

Bénédicte Savoy
Epistemologies of Material Culture
“Africa’s Struggle for its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat 1965-1985”

Carlo Ginzburg
Cultures of Conservation, Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
“Lichtenberg’s Knife: A Few Reflections on Conservation”