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).

Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset is Research Associate at the Château de Versailles and currently Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Centre for Textile Research/SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). She is an early modern historian and art historian specializing in the history of decorative arts, fashion and dress, and global trade, with a particular emphasis on the interrelation between art, trade, and diplomacy. She has edited the series of fashion articles published in the Mercure Galant: L’Esprit des Modes au Grand Siècle (CTHS, Paris, 2010). Her publications reflect the various topics she carried out for her research on dress and textiles. They explore, from different perspectives, the ways in which archival sources interact with object based studies. Addressing research on dress and textiles, she aims to restore the threads of history, material culture, and visual culture. Her current research “Dressing the New World” looks at textiles and fashionable goods in the early modern Americas. Furthermore, it intends to understand in detail the trade mechanism of European commodities and fashionable goods in everyday life in a colonial system. Previously, she was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, for the three-year international research project (2010–2013) “Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe 1500–1800,” funded by Humanities in the Research Area (HERA), investigating the creativity and innovation that lay behind the creation and spread of fashionable goods in Early Modern Europe. She also contributed to the V&A Galleries “Europe 1600–1815.” At Bard Graduate Center, she will be working on her book manuscript “Dressing the New World: The Trade and the Culture of Clothing in the New Spanish Colonies 1600–1800.”