Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Fellows talk. They talk to each other in the Research Center. They talk to faculty at the espresso machine. They talk to students at receptions. Fellows also give a formal work in progress talk. And, then, after they’ve returned home and to the regular flow of their lives, we ask them to send us a brief essay of no precise nature on their time at BGC—a different kind of fellows talk. That’s what we have collected here. Some are precise accountings of work done and others are more impressionistic expressions of happy time past. But all of them convey why we have a fellows program: to bring interesting ideas into the building for the mutual benefit of our ever-widening intellectual community.