Adam Brandow brings diverse academic and professional experiences to his doctoral work at BGC. He received a BA in Musicology and German from Bates College (2003), an MA from Bard Graduate Center (2009) and was a PhD student in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center (2009–2010). He worked as a silver specialist at Christie’s (2010–2014), a furniture restorer at a prominent New York gallery (2015–2016), and was Research Associate in the Department of Arms and Armor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017-2019), where he collaborated on the international loan exhibition The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I. His dissertation will investigate intersections between identity(-ies) and the material lives of the earliest German-speaking communities in the Hudson River Valley, who settled in the region at the beginning of the eighteenth century.