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).

Asli Niyazioğlu is an associate professor of Ottoman history at the University of Oxford. She began her research on Ottomans and their world with a PhD from Harvard, followed by a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and an assistant professorship at Koç University, Istanbul. Her scholarship focuses on the role of imagination in the making of urban communities in early modern Istanbul. In her first book, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul (Routledge, 2016), she explored how the narration of dreams provided Ottoman biographers with a means to form learned communities in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Currently, she is working on her second book project on Ottoman stories about Istanbul’s antiquities from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Building on the recent research on the afterlives of Byzantine monuments and histories of the Islamic occult, she examines why Ottomans wrote about ancient columns and statues as powerful talismans and why they urged their readers to pay attention to their many uses for the urban life.