Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Malcolm Baker is Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. His career trajectory has involved moves between museums (including the V&A from which he retired as Head of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries project) and universities in the United Kingdom and United States. Although his publications range from a study of twelfth-century illustrated saints’ lives to articles on eighteenth-century Scottish silver and nineteenth-century cast collections, his main focus has been primarily on eighteenth-century sculpture. The materiality of sculpture and the relationship between sculpture and the applied arts have been continuing themes within his articles and books. These include The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale UP, 2015); Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument (co-authored with David Bindman and awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for Art History; Yale UP, 1995); and Figured in Marble: Making and Viewing Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (V&A Publications and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000). He recently curated the exhibition, Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust, for the Yale Center for British Art and the Rothschild Foundation, Waddesdon Manor, with a catalogue about images of the poet Alexander Pope. He is currently working on a book about portraits of authors and changing notions of authorship in the long eighteenth century. At Bard Graduate Center, he will be exploring the dissemination of author portraits in various media, especially ceramics, and the agency exercised by these widely replicated images in the formation of a national literary canon and the increasing celebrity of individual writers.