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

Nomadic Material Culture: Western Eurasia in the First Millennium BC

The emergence of fully mobile lifeways is one of the most distinctive features of the Eurasian steppe belt of the first millennium BC. Current scholarship tends to ascribe this shift in subsistence to either technological or environmental factors, such as innovations in bridle design enabling the formation of specialized cavalry and herd management or medium-term changes in precipitation which forced previously settled communities to range more widely for pasture. In this course we will adopt a less determinist approach by bringing into play ethnographic comparanda and the characteristic material repertoire of the nomads. We will give voice to the oral accounts from modern nomads describing mobile herding as a positive lifestyle choice and look at the recurring social activities through which nomadic groups came to perceive themselves as masters of their own destiny. Special attention will be given to the seasonal contexts of production and consumption that structured the nomads’ dwelling in time and place, including food storage for exchange and feasting, leatherprocessing and felt-making for clothing and containers, wood-carving and bronzecasting for bridle equipment, and the construction of monumental mounded tombs. We will bring out how technological choices in everyday life called on artifacts and non-human animals as partners in building the far-flung social networks that allowed nomadic societies to flourish without relying on agriculture, writing, money and commodity exchange. The syllabus will range geographically from the permafrost tombs of Kazakhstan and southern Siberia to the kurgans and hillforts of the northern Black Sea region, associated with the Scythians and Sarmatians in the GrecoRoman textual tradition. We will also evaluate how the ‘ethnographic’ accounts by Herodotus and other ancient authors have shaped representations of nomadism in academic writing, modernist art, and nationalist ideologies. The course will be delivered through in-class discussions, lectures, a museum visit, and a practical craft session. Assessment components include two written assignments and a class presentation. 3 Credits. Satisfies the nonWestern or Pre-1800 requirement.