As an institute for advanced study of the cultural history of the material world, Bard Graduate Center is defined by the way it relates teaching, research, and exhibitions.

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

At the center of our field of vision is the material world—the ways it has shaped human experience and relationships in the past, and how the past informs the present and future in new or unexpected ways. Bard Graduate Center shares an intellectual foundation with innovative and transdisciplinary historical schools that emerged in the early twentieth century. Our mission is to develop new approaches to social and cultural history informed by material things as well as by textual sources. Even further back lies the work of collectors, connoisseurs, and antiquarians who were among the first scholars to take objects seriously as both evidentiary and aesthetic documents. These lineages are relevant for our study of all regions of the world, and underpin our broad global and chronological scope. Graduate education in small group seminars is informed by faculty research. Many of our exhibitions are also faculty-initiated and developed through dedicated research seminars and direct student participation.

Teaching – Research – Exhibitions

Bard Graduate Center’s encyclopedic breadth is articulated along the axes of geography, chronology, materials, and methods. Faculty members are drawn from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, materials science, and philosophy, while our students come from an even wider range of undergraduate majors. Visiting researchers, co-instructors, and speakers connect students and faculty with colleagues and like-minded institutions around the world. Our curriculum offers unique, hands-on opportunities to study an array of material culture in a variety of settings. An expanding Study Collection makes diverse items of global material culture available for close examination, research, and classroom use. Relationships with curatorial and conservation colleagues in New York museums (our extended “Cultural Sciences Campus”) enable onsite visits for classes and individual students. BGC has partnered in the creation and implementation of exhibitions with major institutions, including the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Our summer travel program, often anchored by international partnerships in France and Greece, augments the curriculum with site-specific visits, research, and first-hand experience in collections and archaeological field methods. This expansive vision is supported by two departments that prepare our students to engage in widely accessible forms of scholarship and that help extend BGC’s footprint well beyond West 86th Street: Digital Humanities/Exhibitions, which coordinates the production of digital research and exhibition projects; and Public Humanities + Research, which programs an ambitious roster of visiting fellowships, lectures, symposia, gallery tours, workshops, performances, and events.

Combining the freedom and focus of a specialist institute with the teaching, research, and gallery resources of larger academic and museum institutions, Bard Graduate Center integrates object-based learning with cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary inquiry.

Welcome Letter from the Director

Bard Graduate Center opened its doors in the fall of 1993. Early on I expressed my conviction that “the aspirations and habits of civilization are revealed through the decorative arts, which are fundamental to the lives of all individuals,” and my hope that the Center would help “advance the recognition of the decorative arts as one of the primary expressions of human achievement.” Since then, Bard Graduate Center has more than fulfilled these original aspirations, uniting innovative degree programs with path-breaking museum exhibitions to create a new context for the study of a significant portion of the artistic heritage of human history. As we have added new faculty and new foci, we have also broadened our horizons and our self description. Our even more ambitious aim now is to become the leading center for the study of the cultural history of the material world. Bard Graduate Center’s first three decades were truly amazing. And all of us here—faculty, staff, and students—eagerly look forward to what the next decades will bring. We hope you will want to join us.

Susan Weber
Founder and Director

Areas of Special Strength

Within our global and transhistorical focus on the material world, our current faculty resources and worldwide institutional partnerships make us particularly robust in ten overlapping areas of special strength: Each of these areas are flexible and draw on the changing interests and expertise of our permanent faculty members, as well as postdoctoral fellows and visiting instructors from our New York “Cultural Sciences Campus.” They are reflected in course offerings as well as recurring faculty-programmed research events. Rather than constituting defined or official tracks through our curriculum, these ten areas of special strength offer our students productive points of reference for a broad exploration of history and culture through their tangible and material traces.

MA/PhD

Africa and African Diaspora

MA/PhD

Chinese Decorative Arts and Material Culture

MA/PhD

Cultural Encounter, Colonialism, and Indigeneity

MA/PhD

Early Modern Europe

MA/PhD

Expansive Archaeologies

MA/PhD

Global Middle Ages

MA/PhD

Modern Design and Craft

MA/PhD

Museums, Collecting, Conservation

MA/PhD

New York and American Material Culture

MA/PhD

Textiles, Dress, and Fashion

Constructing arguments with material things is a mode of scholarship more readily associated with curators than with academics, who are rarely familiar with the challenges such work entails. Bard Graduate Center’s pioneering Focus Project aims to produce faculty and students who are bilingual in both museum and academic modes of scholarly investigation.

Tour of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: Graphic Design Between the World Wars, a Focus Exhibition curated by Paul Stirton, Professor Emeritus, Bard Graduate Center.

Each Focus Project is proposed and led by a Bard Graduate Center faculty member or postdoctoral fellow in collaboration with interested students. Originating in faculty research, the project is developed through seminars and workshops that proceed from broad issues of conception and definition through the specific challenges of selection, layout, and interpretation. Students are closely involved from genesis through execution and contribute substantively to each project’s form and content. These academic teams are assisted by a professional gallery staff of curators, designers, and media specialists, as well as the head of the Focus Project, a fellow faculty member with museum experience who acts as conceptual guide and facilitator.

Exhibition view of Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Focus Exhibition curated by Hadley Jensen, BGC/AMNH Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology, and BGC Alum.

Although Focus Projects culminate in a public exhibition in our Gallery at 18 West 86th Street, complete with accompanying publications and/or digital interactive features, the Focus Project is as much about process as product. By the time an exhibition opens, participants will have acquired hands-on experience of museum practice, from the development of a loan list to the composition and editing of wall labels.

Sasha Nixon (MA ’18), curator of A View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements.

Topics reflect the range of interests and perspectives of the Bard Graduate Center community, involving issues in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies. Past Focus exhibitions have investigated the material relations between Native peoples and newcomers on the Northwest Pacific coast in the late 19th century; the design and circulation of American Christmas cards; the fractal geometry of Benoît Mandelbrot; the role of actresses as fashion setters in the Belle Époque; the 1,500-year history of woven coca bags from the Andes; images of mid-19th-century New York City; the development of personal computer interface design; the role of indigenous knowledge in historical and contemporary Navajo textile dying and weaving; and the carving of meats and folding of napkins at European banquets in the early modern period. Through the Focus Project, Bard Graduate Center aims not only to mentor more versatile scholars, whether academics or curators, but also to encourage a new and collaborative form of curatorial scholarship.