Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Christina Anderson is the Research Fellow in the Study of Collecting at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. She specializes in the history of the decorative and fine arts, collecting, trade, and travel, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of art, commerce, and values in the early modern period. Her first book on the Flemish merchant Daniel Nijs and his brokering of the sale of the Gonzaga art collection to Charles I of England in 1627, titled The Flemish Merchant of Venice (Yale UP), was named one of Christie’s 11 best art books of 2015. Her current book project, on the Flemish merchant diaspora 1450–1650, explores the ways in which these merchants acted as cultural diffusers and wielded cultural influence through their patronage and collecting practices. She is a prolific editor of scholarly books—she is responsible for no less than 13 volumes that will be published between 2016 and 2019—on early modern merchants as collectors, on the cultural history of furniture, and on the cultural history of collecting. She holds a doctorate in Art History from the University of Oxford and has held a number of prestigious awards, most recently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Before taking up her position in Oxford, she founded an art and antiques research consultancy in London. At Bard Graduate Center, Anderson will be completing her second book manuscript.