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).

Lynda Nead is the Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Basil Blackwell, 1990), The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (Routledge, 1992), Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (Yale University Press, 2000), The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (Yale University Press, 2008), and The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (Yale University Press for Paul Mellon Studies in British Art, 2017). Nead has been on the Advisory Councils of the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain and is currently a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Museum of London and English Heritage Blue Plaques Panel. She is a Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society and an elected Member of the Academia Europaea.

During her stay at Bard Graduate Center, she will be working on a new research project called “British Blonde: Glamour, Desire and Femininity in Post-War Britain c.1945-70.” In the 1950s American glamour proclaimed the triumph of capitalism and was exported to a war-torn Britain, Hollywood style glamour was part of a larger passage of commodities that crossed the Atlantic in this period but in the process something important happened: Blonde became British. Marilyn Monroe became Diana Dors, a figure able to articulate, through look and style, a narrative of the post-war nation.