About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.






MA/PhD

As an institute for advanced study of the cultural history of the material world, Bard Graduate Center is defined by the way it relates teaching, research, and exhibitions.

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

At the center of our field of vision is the material world—the ways it has shaped human experience and relationships in the past, and how the past informs the present and future in new or unexpected ways. Bard Graduate Center shares an intellectual foundation with innovative and transdisciplinary historical schools that emerged in the early twentieth century. Our mission is to develop new approaches to social and cultural history informed by material things as well as by textual sources. Even further back lies the work of collectors, connoisseurs, and antiquarians who were among the first scholars to take objects seriously as both evidentiary and aesthetic documents. These lineages are relevant for our study of all regions of the world, and underpin our broad global and chronological scope. Graduate education in small group seminars is informed by faculty research. Many of our exhibitions are also faculty-initiated and developed through dedicated research seminars and direct student participation.

Teaching – Research – Exhibitions
Bard Graduate Center’s encyclopedic breadth is articulated along the axes of geography, chronology, materials, and methods. Faculty members are drawn from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, materials science, and philosophy, while our students come from an even wider range of undergraduate majors. Visiting researchers, co-instructors, and speakers connect students and faculty with colleagues and like-minded institutions around the world. Our curriculum offers unique, hands-on opportunities to study an array of material culture in a variety of settings. An expanding Study Collection makes diverse items of global material culture available for close examination, research, and classroom use. Relationships with curatorial and conservation colleagues in New York museums (our extended “Cultural Sciences Campus”) enable onsite visits for classes and individual students. BGC has partnered in the creation and implementation of exhibitions with major institutions, including the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Our summer travel program, often anchored by international partnerships in France and Greece, augments the curriculum with site-specific visits, research, and first-hand experience in collections and archaeological field methods. This expansive vision is supported by two departments that prepare our students to engage in widely accessible forms of scholarship and that help extend BGC’s footprint well beyond West 86th Street: Digital Humanities/Exhibitions, which coordinates the production of digital research and exhibition projects; and Public Humanities + Research, which programs an ambitious roster of visiting fellowships, lectures, symposia, gallery tours, workshops, performances, and events.

Combining the freedom and focus of a specialist institute with the teaching, research, and gallery resources of larger academic and museum institutions, Bard Graduate Center integrates object-based learning with cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary inquiry.
Welcome Letter from the Director
Bard Graduate Center opened its doors in the fall of 1993. Early on I expressed my conviction that “the aspirations and habits of civilization are revealed through the decorative arts, which are fundamental to the lives of all individuals,” and my hope that the Center would help “advance the recognition of the decorative arts as one of the primary expressions of human achievement.” Since then, Bard Graduate Center has more than fulfilled these original aspirations, uniting innovative degree programs with path-breaking museum exhibitions to create a new context for the study of a significant portion of the artistic heritage of human history. As we have added new faculty and new foci, we have also broadened our horizons and our self description. Our even more ambitious aim now is to become the leading center for the study of the cultural history of the material world. Bard Graduate Center’s first three decades were truly amazing. And all of us here—faculty, staff, and students—eagerly look forward to what the next decades will bring. We hope you will want to join us.


Susan Weber
Founder and Director
Areas of Special Strength
Within our global and transhistorical focus on the material world, our current faculty resources and worldwide institutional partnerships make us particularly robust in ten overlapping areas of special strength: Each of these areas are flexible and draw on the changing interests and expertise of our permanent faculty members, as well as postdoctoral fellows and visiting instructors from our New York “Cultural Sciences Campus.” They are reflected in course offerings as well as recurring faculty-programmed research events. Rather than constituting defined or official tracks through our curriculum, these ten areas of special strength offer our students productive points of reference for a broad exploration of history and culture through their tangible and material traces.



Digital Humanities/Exhibitions (DH/DX)



DH/DX at the Bard Graduate Center is a comprehensive curricular approach to decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies that leverages emerging digital tools and methodologies to support the creation and investigation of new modes of scholarship in the human sciences.

DH/DX begins in the classroom with BGC’s Digital Literacy Initiative, a program that actively seeks creative solutions to object-based research challenges and trains all students to use a variety of digital tools. Students then implement these skills in their own research and have opportunities to collaborate on course-based projects such as BGC’s Focus Project exhibitions. This wide array of projects includes multimedia online exhibitions, location-based applications, 3D printing and modelling, mapping, and extended and mixed reality (AR/VR) experiences, with a particular focus on the development of interactive features for galleries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions.


To support this work, students have access to BGC’s Digital Media Lab (DML), a well-equipped space with significant hardware and software resources that serves as a hub for digital project development, training, and collaboration within the institution. In addition, throughout the year, an extensive offering of digital-focused workshops, lunch-time talks, and events further connects the BGC community to important conversations, projects, and professionals from cultural and academic institutions in New York City and beyond.

Jesse Merandy
is the Director of DH/DX.
Dr. Merandy has more than 20 years of experience developing digital projects in the academic, commercial, and cultural heritage sectors. Over the past five years he has collaborated with students and faculty to realize many innovative digital interactive projects at the BGC. His research interests include interactive technology and pedagogy, location-based mobile experiences, digital exhibition design, and nineteenth-century New York City.

Contact: jesse.merandy@bgc.bard.edu, (212) 501-3061

Digital Humanities

Digital Literacy at BGC
The Digital Literacy Initiative is an innovative component of the DH/DX curricular plan that aims to provide BGC students with a robust set of digital experiences which they can leverage in their academic and professional careers.


Throughout their course of study, BGC students undertake a series of intensive project-based workshops and training sessions in which they gain hands-on experience working with a variety of digital tools. The Digital Literacy Initiative challenges students to think critically about the application of these tools to illuminate new insights and pathways in their work. Students apply these skills to their own research projects, which become important additions to their portfolios and provide experiences that prepare them for positions in cultural institutions, non-profits, and academia that increasingly require strong digital backgrounds.

Digital Project Information Sheet
Digital Project Requirements Form

Featured Digital Literacy Project

Kettle of Community, Jordane Birkett


Featured Course Project

Body of the Poet



MDP Concentration and Digital QP

Students wishing to further explore the use of digital tools and methodologies in their research/academic studies can pursue the Concentration in Museum Practice, Digital Scholarship, and Public Engagement (MDP) or develop a digital project for their capstone Qualifying Paper (Digital QP). In undertaking these opportunities, students gain additional experience producing material culture research through multimodal and multidisciplinary approaches, developing equal mastery of both content, the tools of advanced scholarship, and the innovative application of digital ideas.

Featured Digital QP Project

A History of Trash In Sight, Jaime Ding

Digital Exhibitions

With its world-class gallery and yearly slate of exhibitions, the Bard Graduate Center provides incredible opportunities for students interested in the role of digital tools in exhibition design and material culture studies.


Through participation in Focus Projects, small-scale, academically rigorous exhibitions originating from the research of BGC faculty and postdoctoral fellows, students collaborate with curators and gallery staff, the director of DH/DX, and outside design firms to develop digital interactives that explore the stories, cultures, and histories of exhibition objects. These experiences prepare students for highly sought-after positions working with digital tools in museums, galleries, and cultural heritage spaces and provide a public record of their work and scholarship.

Featured Digital Exhibition Projects

Fabricating Power With Balinese Textiles



Visualizing 19th-Century New York

Click to view website.


Explore more DH/DX Projects below.