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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.

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Applications for our MA program may be submitted until March 1, 2025





Research

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.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.



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Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania examined artifacts as the contested space of cross-cultural contact between European collectors and the native peoples of the region. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertwined in relationships of exchange and power. Focusing on Oceania—the vast region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the tropical Pacific Islands—Frontier Shores explored how anthropology was used by colonial powers to justify and gain control over the resources and lives of the various native peoples, how collection both described and pacified the frontier, and how marginalized peoples adapted to, resisted, or otherwise exerted their own power and agency in the colonial context.

Thirty-nine objects, collected from the 1830s to the mid-twentieth century, demonstrated the richness of cultural contact in Oceania and the ways in which this material was often used to construct an imagined culture or tradition. A digital interactive available in the Gallery and online explored the cultural makeup of this diverse region and plotted many of the objects into a chronology of cultural contact.