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).

Renee Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History and Professor of Comparative American Studies and Africana Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio and adjunct professor of Museum Studies at CUNY School of Professional Studies. A specialist in recent American cultural and political history and in the field of historical memory, she explores the creation, contestation, and promotion of different narratives of America’s racial history. She is the author of Racial Reckoning; Reopening America’s Civil Rights Trials (2014) and Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003), as well as the coeditor of three collections: Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (2018); Doing Recent History (2012); and The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006). She has served as a consultant for the New-York Historical Society, the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and the May 4th Visitor’s Center at Kent State University. While at Bard Graduate Center, she will be researching sites of Confederate memory outside the South, especially focusing on the commemoration of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a nineteenth-century blackface performer and the composer of “Dixie.”