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).

I teach and write on medieval art and material and visual culture from the greater Mediterranean to Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. I am currently completing a book on art and material culture circulating in the Black Sea region during the Middle Ages and another monograph which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. I am the co-editor of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. I am the author of The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) and of Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland (2023). I am also the curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018).

To learn more about my research, click here.

Selected Recent Publications

The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place. 2018.

Editor, Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Images at Work, a special issue of Representations vol. 133 (Winter 2016).

Hildesheim Avant-Garde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism, Speculum 93/3 (July 2018).

“Living Matter: Materiality, Maker and Ornament in the Middle Ages .” Gesta 52:2 2013 (2013).

“Beyond Representation: Things, Human and Nonhuman .” In Cultural Histories of the Material World, edited by Peter N. Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Selected Courses

731 Late Antique/Early Medieval Material Culture and the Making of Europe

748 The Sea Inside: Art and Material Culture of the Mediterranean World 1050-1250

849 Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Ages: An Introduction

851 The Occult and Its Artifact in the Middle Ages

858 In Focus: Ex Voto: Agents of Faith

896 Court Culture Compared

924 Gothic Visions: From the Visigoths to Post-Punk