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 area of research is the art and material culture of early modern Northern Europe. I have published on Renaissance aesthetics, the history of collecting, intersections of art and science, theories of ornament, aspects of the early modern domestic interior, and on the Reformation and the arts. My current research focuses on works of art and craft made for the Kunstkammer of sixteenth-century northern Europe, and in particular on the knowledge base and intellectual aspirations of the elite craftsmen who made them: urban, educated, inventive, intellectually curious, and fired by the values of humanism—whose interests intersected with those of their courtly patrons and whose creations gave material shape to the philosophical speculations and enquiries about the world that arose within the Kunstkammer’s milieu.

Selected Recent Publications

“Turning Back the Sun: Christoph Schissler’s Horologium Achaz as Kunststück,” in, Manipulating the Sun. Picturing Astronomical Miracles from the Bible in the Early Modern Era eds. Volker Remmert and Julia Ellinghaus, Nuncius Series. Studies and Sources in the Material and Visual History of Science, ed. Marco Beretta and Sven Dupré (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

“Object Worlds: Kunststück and Kunstkammer” in James Symonds eds., A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance, (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World: co-edited with Mary Laven and Suzanna Ivaniç (University of Amsterdam Press, 2019).

“The Arts of Early Modern Augsburg, 1450-1700,’’ in Mark Häberlein and Ann Tlusty eds., Brill Companion to Early Modern Augsburg (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

(with Pamela O. Long), “Renaissance Craft and Technology“ in Gordon Campbell ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2019).

“Art, Geometry, and the Imagery of Ruins in the Sixteenth-Century German Kunstkabinett,” in Catherine Ingersoll, Alisa McCusker Jessica Weiss eds., Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019).

“’On the Picture of King Charles I…written in Psalms.’ Devotion, Memory and the Micrographic Portrait” in Antoinina Bevan Zlatar and Olga Timofeeva eds., What is an Image in Medieval and early modern England? (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 34, 2017).

“The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art. The Unicorn Cup of Jan Vermeyen,” in The Agency of Things in Medieval and early Modern Art, eds., Graźyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz, Zuzanna Sarnecka, (London/New York: Routledge, 2017).

“Io’s Trace: The Art and Science of “Antique Letters” and the Origins of Knowledge,” in The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400-1700. Essays in Honor of Larry Silver, eds Debra Taylor Cashin, Henry Luttikhuizen, Ashley D. West (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

“Urban Craftsmen and the Courts in Sixteenth-Century Germany,“ in Dagmar Eichberger and Phillipe Lorentz eds, The Artist between Court and City (1300-1600). L’artiste entre la cour et la ville. Der Künstler zwischen Hof und Stadt (Petersberg: Michael Imhoff Verlag, 2017).

“The Family at Table: Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth-Century Zurich”, in Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, edited by Bridget Heal and Joseph L. Koerner, special issue, Art History, vol. 40, Issue 2, April 2017.

“The Place of Colour in Martin Schaffner’s Universe Table,“ in Tawrin Baker, Sven Dupré, Sachiko Kusukawa, Karin Leonhard eds, Early Modern Colour Worlds, Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015); and in book form, Brill (2016), 476-511.

“Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early Modern Home”, in The Oxford Handbook to the Bible in England, c. 1520-1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Willie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize (Reference Works),

Selected Courses

541 Northern European Interiors, 1550–1680

584 Survey of European Ceramics, 1400 to 1900

621 The Renaissance Discovery of the World: Collecting and Collections in the Early Modern Era

624 Classicism in the North, 1500–1620

741 Renaissance Mythologies

846 Objects of Knowledge: Renaissance Ornament and Society in Northern Europe, 1500-1650

866 Transalpine Renaissances

894 Objects of Belief: Religion and the Arts of Northern Europe 1450-1600

899 The Culture of Prints in Early Modern Europe

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

918 Material Culture and Social Life in the Early Modern Home, 1500–1700