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).

New York, New York, April 29, 2015 —Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Freyja Hartzell will join its faculty as assistant professor of Modern Design History on July 1, 2015. “We are delighted to welcome Freyja back,” said Dean Peter N. Miller. “The first of our graduates to be appointed to a tenure-track position here, she has established herself as a scholar with a substantial track record of publications and postgraduate training.”

Dr. Hartzell was most recently assistant professor of Material and Visual Culture in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. She has taught since 2009 in the MA program in Design History and Curatorial Studies at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and in the Department of Art and Art History at Wesleyan University. She received her undergraduate degree in 1998 from Grinnell College, her MA from Bard Graduate Center in 2005, and her PhD in 2012 from the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. Her research and teaching span topics in the history of European art, design, and architecture from 1750 through the present day, with special emphasis on German visual and material culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published articles on fin-de-siècle Parisian fashion and furniture; early nineteenth-century Biedermeier interiors and theatricality; the modernization of German stoneware ceramics; and the significance of medieval and Renaissance culture for German modernism. Her research has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Central European History Society. Dr. Hartzell’s book manuscript —Designs on the Body: The Modern Art of Richard Riemerschmid —examines how Munich artist Richard Riemerschmid’s early twentieth-century designs for housewares, interiors, and clothing force a reconception of canonical modernism. She is currently pursuing new research on conceptual and material aspects of transparency in design and architecture and their cultural politics in international modernism.

About Bard Graduate Center

Founded in 1993, Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Its Gallery exhibitions and publications, MA and PhD programs, and research initiatives explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. A member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), Bard Graduate Center is an academic unit of Bard College. For more information, visit bgc.bard.edu.