Students may take courses at our consortium partner institutions which include Columbia University (COL), Cooper Hewitt, Parsons School of Design (CH), the City University of …

Independent study offers students the opportunity to pursue research in areas beyond the range of the standard curriculum. Through independent study, students further their knowledge …

This two-and-a-half week August session includes introductions to resources at Bard Graduate Center, as well as required digital and writing seminars, and language classes, if …

Right after the fall of the glorious Tang Empire (618-907 CE), the rise of the nomadic Kitans not only reshaped the multipolar geopolitical system of …

This seminar aims to revisit the role and function of sacred arts in the three Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, in order to bring …

From the mid-nineteenth century through the contemporary moment, Black populations living in Africa, the Americas, and other diasporas have led significant socio-cultural and political movements, …

The screen is a versatile object with multivalent functions and meanings. At once a piece of furniture and an artistic medium, a screen structures a …

Today, the term rococo denotes a distinctive visual style that developed in France in the 1730s and quickly appealed to patrons, makers, and designers worldwide. …

Early modern Europe has been dubbed the “Age of Exploration” or the “Age of Discovery,” but exploration and discovery included people from the Americas, Africa, …

Over the past twenty years the mounting environmental crisis of global scale has led many scholars to question the dominant anthropocentric models of interpretation inherited …

This two-semester, team-taught course introduces incoming students to major historical developments in decorative arts, design, and material culture from antiquity to the present. Monday evening …

This course is required for entering students who have not taken a course deemed comparable. Drawing on the expertise of BGC faculty, it introduces incoming …

This two-semester practicum on Tuesday afternoons develops techniques for effective graduate-level writing through practical exercises and workshop sessions. Drawing on the assignments and readings in 500…

All students are encouraged to attend the rich program of lectures, symposia, seminars, performances, lunches, and talks organized by Bard Graduate Center’s Public Humanities + …

This seminar examines the shifting boundaries of craft and design in the United States from World War II to the present. In the postwar era’…

Beginning in the sixteenth century and peaking in the eighteenth, increasing numbers of affluent travelers from northern Europe, along with their tutors, artists, chaperones, and …

Decades before the opening of the Bauhaus School in 1919, German design asserted its remarkable power and presence, endowing everyday things with a unique agency within …

The exhibition, where objects are grouped together for a limited time to elucidate a particular thesis or argument, has been a key curatorial practice since …

The nineteenth century saw a revolution in the materials and technologies available to artists for their representation of the natural world. These innovations also facilitated …

Colonization, enslavement, urbanization, immigration, industrialization, westward expansion, community—these are complicated and contested topics central to the history and identity of the United States. People …

The standard textbooks of ancient art tend to present its history either in narratives concentrating on great artists and their inventions or as a succession …