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

Supple Solids: A Deep History of Soft Containers

Research on technology has long prioritized tools over containers, privileging action, agency, and intervention—traits culturally coded as masculine—over receptivity, support, and relational capacity. This bias reflects a deep-rooted tendency to associate value with instrumental power while rendering invisible the conditions that enable such power. This course traces the overlooked history of container technologies with a special focus on “supple solids”: materials such as bark, leather, felt, fiber, and skin, whose loose physical structure allows them to absorb, adapt, and enclose. They are shaped not by carving or casting but by scraping, knotting, sewing, or twining. Soft containers such as bags and slings are wearable and portable in ways that hard containers are not. They integrate with bodily movement, or enfold and protect the body, and, in this way, become part of how bodies inhabit social worlds. At the center of this technological repertoire is the human body itself, whose skin and hollow viscera form the primordial container that shapes early experiences of interiority, flow, and difference. Much older than pottery, soft containers are central to how humans came to act and think the way we still do. They enable temporal planning by facilitating transport. They allow for group mobility and modularity through the gathering of resources and the storing of substances without fixing their volume or form. Their flexibility and permeability also open new ways of interacting with materials through insulation and filtering, actions of revealing and concealing, or controlled distribution of contents. Last but not least, the making of soft containers requires fine motor skills, foresight and symbolic abstraction, which are all linked to the evolution of cognitive complexity and language. By configuring relationships between “inside” and “outside”, containers also scaffold many of the metaphors we think through and live by. As a contemporary coda, we will explore plastics— synthetic materials that mimic the flexibility of supple solids and raise urgent questions about health and sustainability. Plastics recast the logic of soft containers in industrial and planetary terms, inviting us to reflect on the material afterlives of our most mundane enclosures. Ephemeral and invisible, soft containers have been central to the unfolding of human reasoning, mobility, and relational life. This course foregrounds their history to reveal how containing and supplying—rather than interference and control—lie at the heart of human intelligence. 3 credits. Satisfies the chronological requirement.