Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Bard Graduate Center advances the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through its object-centered approach to teaching, research, exhibitions, publications, and events.

At BGC, we study the human past and present through their material expressions. We focus on objects and other material forms—from those valued for their aesthetic elements to the ordinary things used in everyday life.

Our accomplished interdisciplinary faculty inspires and prepares students in our MA and PhD programs for successful careers in academia, museums, and the private sector. We bring equal intellectual rigor to our acclaimed exhibitions, award-winning catalogues and scholarly publications, and innovative public programs, and we view all of these integrated elements as vital to our curriculum.

BGC’s campus comprises a state-of-the-art academic programs building at 38 West 86th Street, a gallery at 18 West 86th Street, and a residence hall at 410 West 58th Street. A new collection study center will open at 8 West 86th Street in 2026.

Founded by Dr. Susan Weber in 1993, Bard Graduate Center has become the preeminent institute for academic research and exhibition of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is an accredited unit of Bard College and a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).

New York, New York, March 18, 2015 —Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Abigail Krasner Balbale will join its faculty as assistant professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture on July 1, 2015. “After many years of searching,” said Dean Peter N. Miller, “we are delighted to have so successfully concluded our efforts to permanently establish the study of Islamic material culture in our curriculum with a scholar trained as a historian of Christian as well as Muslim Europe, of Iberia as well as North Africa, and of texts as well as artifacts.”

Dr. Balbale, who was most recently assistant professor of medieval Mediterranean History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, received her undergraduate degree in 2003 from Yale and her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2012 from Harvard, where she focused on the cultural history of medieval Iberia and North Africa. From 2012 to 2014, she was Bard Graduate Center’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art and Material Culture. She is the co-author, with Jerrilynn Dodds and María Rosa Menocal, of the award-winning book, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, 2008). Her current project is tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Alliance, Accommodation and Resistance in Ibn Mardanīsh’s al-Andalus.” Among her recent work, which has been supported by Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Mellon fellowships, are a co-edited volume, Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean (Brill, 2013), an article on jihad as a legitimation tactic in thirteenth-century al-Andalus, and an essay on the Berber dynasties of the Islamic far west in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).

About Bard Graduate Center

Founded in 1993, Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Its Gallery exhibitions and publications, MA and PhD programs, and research initiatives explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. A member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), it is an academic unit of Bard College.