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 center to house BGC’s Study Collection is planned for 8 West 86th Street.

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).

My work on material culture addresses intersections among history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. My principal scholarly concern is to mobilize non-written traces of the past to illuminate aspects of the lives of human actors that would otherwise remain obscure. As well as writing individual historical case studies on topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, to Roman baroque sculpture, Native American baskets, and Congo textiles, I work on the philosophical plane of second order questioning. While on the faculty at Cambridge University, I collaborated with the late Salim Kemal to edit a ten book series of multi-author volumes, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts. I have organized numerous experimental exhibitions at Harvard University, where I taught and curated between 1991 and 2011. I am the author, editor, or co-editor of sixteen books, and have contributed to numerous journals and edited volumes in history, art history, and philosophy.

Selected Recent Publications

Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2024.

“’To build still more deliberately’: Architectural Reconstruction and the House that Thoreau Built.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Architectural Reconstruction, ed. Lisa Giombini and Zoltán Somhegyi, 323–344. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

“A Seventeenth-Century Likeness of Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship.” In Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Darren Hudson Hick. New York and London: Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, 2023

“Aesthetics, Ontology, and a Museum Acquisition.” In Aesthetic Literacy, Volume II: Out of Mind, ed. Valery Vinogradovs, 153-167. n.p., Mongrel Matter, 2023.

“Against Theory—Again (Though with Reservations).” In Contemporary Aesthetics 20, 2022

“Active Matter: Some Initial Philosophical Considerations” (with A.W. Eaton). In Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh, 51-64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

“Toward an Aesthetics of Degradation” (with A.W. Eaton). In Conserving Active Matter: Essays. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022

The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture. Edited with Sarah Anne Carter. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Works of Art and Mere Real Things—Again.” In British Journal of Aesthetics 60, 2020, 131-149.

Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2019.

Selected Courses

871 Thinking with Things in North America

876 Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting

883 Damage, Decay, Conservation

912 Curatorial Practice and American Art at the Metropolitan Museum

915 History and Material Culture: New Directions

932 The American Civil War: Art and Material Culture

967 Oceania: Art and Material Culture