Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico: Mixing Epistemologies (Cambridge, 2016). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (with Deborah L. Nichols, Oxford, 2017), The Menial Art of Cooking (with Sarah R. Graff, University Press of Colorado, 2012), and a special section titled “Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem—Remembering Elizabeth M. Brumfiel” (with Deborah L. Nichols, Ancient Mesoamerica Vol. 27, Issue 01). As part of his efforts to bring anthropology to broad publics, he recently co-edited Xaltocan: arqueología, historia y comunidad (with Christopher Morehart and Kristin De Lucia, 2019). This book is self-published to be distributed free to the community of Xaltocan, where he has run archaeological projects since 2003. He also appears in “The Story of God, with Morgan Freeman” (season 1, episode 1). His current project is titled “The material worlds of colonial Mexico City,” and it has received support from the National Science Foundation, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the University of Texas at Austin. It integrates an original analysis of 39 probate inventories of Spanish colonizers who died in Mexico City during the sixteenth century with archaeological findings in excavations in Spanish houses in the historic center of the city. The project examines the daily life of colonizers, their patterns of material consumption, the adoption of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers, and how people used material goods in their negotiation of power and social relationships.