Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography at the School of Architecture and an Associated Faculty member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, as well as a member of the executive committees for the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. His work addresses the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, as well as the histories of science, anthropology, and psychological aesthetics. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), the co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (The MIT Press, 2014), and the author of over eighty articles published in academic journals and edited anthologies. He is currently completing a second personal book project titled World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale examining the cosmic analogies of bodily and architectural adornment from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and he is also preparing the first edition of Frederick Kiesler’s unpublished book project Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing with the collaboration of the Kiesler Foundation in Vienna. During his residency at Bard Graduate Center, Papapetros will draw from the BGC’s extensive resources in the history of applied arts to complete his World Ornament book project. Building on the ontological problematics he broached in his first book on the historiographic legacy of anthropological theories of animism and the survival of alternative epistemological mentalities in the art and architecture of modernity, this new global history of ornamentation, spanning the areas of art and architectural theory and historiography, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and psychoanalysis, proposes a novel theory of the decorative artifact informed by its allegedly marginal position on the world stage, as well as the infinite power of extensibility in the art and architectural economies and environmental politics of the modern era.