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).

My research and teaching areas include early modern European cultural history, history and theory of museums, culinary history, and history of the book. I am most interested in relationships between objects of daily life, including the arts of the kitchen and table, and the dissemination of both learned and practical knowledge through books and prints. My recent research appears in Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens, (Ashgate, 2015) which focuses on the history and reception of the first illustrated cookbook in Europe, published in 1570, through print culture and book history. In 2008-9, I collaborated on the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2009-10, on the exhibition Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta Van Varick at Bard Graduate Center and in 2013, on Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also at Bard Graduate Center.

Selected Recent Publications

“Verbal Representations of Furniture.” In A Cultural History of Furniture: The Age of Exploration, 1500-1700, edited by Christina M. Anderson, 187- 205. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

“Cooking on the Margins: Using Cookbooks,” keynote address, Eating Words, symposium, Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge, England, September 2011.

“Quodlibets and Fricassées: Food in Musical Settings of Street Cries in Early Modern London.” In Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Melissa Calaresu and Danielle Van den Heuvel, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 43 – 61.

“Beyond terminology, or, the limits of “decorative arts.” Journal of Art Historiography Number 11 (December 2014).

“Marriage as a Key to Understanding the Past” and “Celebrating Betrothal, Marriage, and the Family.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ex. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

“The Kitchen as Exemplary Space from Renaissance Treatise to Period Room.” Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2008-9): 20 – 34.

“Between Legend, History and Politics: The Santa Fina Chapel in San Gimignano.” In Italian Renaissance Cities: Cultural Translation and Artistic Exchange, edited by Stephen Campbell and Stephen Milner, 246-272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Selected Courses

501 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II

566 Rites of Passage: Arts of Marriage and Childbirth in the Italian Renaissance

581 Studies in Culinary History and the Decorative Arts

585 The Museum

652 City and Country in the Italian Renaissance

655 Markets to Manners: Cooking and Eating in Early Modern Europe

678 Arts and Crafts in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Kitchen

733 The Exhibition Experience: Design and Interpretation

780 Georges Hoentschel: Collector, Designer, and Architect in Belle-Époque Paris

781 The Early Modern Book: Cookbook as Case Study

866 Transalpine Renaissances

908 Artists, Craftsmen, and the Pursuit of Nature in Renaissance Europe