Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!
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.

Events
Spring Information Session
February 20, 2025





About

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).


Dr. Appadurai’s research and teaching at BGC focuses on the intersection of material culture studies, anthropology, social history, and economics.

Dr. Appadurai joins BGC from New York University where he has served as Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Dr. Appadurai retired from his post at NYU at the end of the 2020-21 academic year but retains other concurrent academic positions including: Mercator Fellow, Free University and Humboldt University, Berlin; Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University, Rotterdam; and Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. Dr. Appadurai continues to be based in Berlin and primarily teaches courses at BGC remotely.

His previous positions include Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School, and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies and Director of the Initiative on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. He has held professorial chairs at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and has visiting professorships at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, University of Delhi, University of Michigan, University of Amsterdam, Humboldt University, Witwatersrand University, and EHESS (Paris).

Select Publications
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997)

Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger
(Duke 2006)

The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition
(Verso 2013)

Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance
(Chicago 2016).

Failure
(Polity Press 2019).
Select Courses
What is Research? II

Object Lessons in Critical Social Theory