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).

My research focuses on various aspects of First Nations visual art and material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, both historically and today. Themes recurring in my work include colonialism and Indigenous modernities, cultural brokerage and translation, the politics of intercultural exchange and display, discourses of tradition and heritage management, history of anthropology and museums, and cultural and intellectual property. Previous research and film projects have examined the intercultural history of totem poles; ethnographic mediation of the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance” of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia; and Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent melodrama, In the Land of the Head Hunters. I have curated two exhibits for the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery: Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (2011); and The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology (2019), the latter in partnership with U’mista Cultural Centre. I am currently co-director of a major collaborative project to create a critical, annotated edition—in print and digital media—of Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw culture.

Glass’ Academia.edu Page

Selected Recent Publications

“Emergent Digital Networks: Museum Collections and Indigenous Knowledge in the Digital Era” (co-authored with Kate Hennessy). In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 1, edited by Igor Krupnik, 165-181. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2022.

“For the Lives of Things: Indigenous Ontologies of Active Matter.” In Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter Miller and Soon Kai Poh, 221-33. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022.

Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021.

Editor, with Brad Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtish, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.

“Indigenous Ontologies, Digital Futures: Plural Provenances and the Kwakwaka’wakw collection in Berlin and Beyond.” In Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges, edited by Raymond Silverman, 19-44. London: Routledge, 2015.

Editor, Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Art, Design History, Material Culture; Distributed by Yale University Press, 2011.

Author, with Aldona Jonaitis, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.

“A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, materiality, and (in)visibility in unpublished Edward Curtis photographs of the Hamat’sa.” Visual Anthropology Review 25 (2) (2009): 128-49.

“Frozen Poses: Hamat’sa dioramas, recursive representation, and the making of a Kwakwaka’wakw icon.” In Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, 89-116. London: Ashgate Press, 2009.

“Crests on Cotton: ‘Souvenir’ T-shirts and the materiality of remembrance among the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia.” Museum Anthropology 31(1) (2008), 1-18.

Selected Courses

481 Unsettling Things: Expanding Conversations in Studies of the Material World

730 The Social Lives of Things: The Anthropology of Art and Material Culture

740 Native Arts of the Northwest Coast

795 Exhibiting Culture/s: Anthropology In and Of the Museum

863 Objects of Colonial Encounter

877 Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture

882 Ethnography and the Material World

922 In the Footsteps of Franz Boas: Native Arts of the North Pacific and the Legacy of the Jesup Expedition