Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.

Trinidad Rico gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Tuesday, October 31, at 12:15 pm. Her talk was entitled “Heritage, Secrecy, and Failure: The Atomic Project Huemul.”

In the early 1950s, the Huemul Island in the Nahuel Huapi National Park of Argentina became host to a short-lived secret nuclear fusion experiment. The site was extensively built but quickly abandoned and has remained since in a state of ruin, with the small exception of a failed attempt to “heritagize” this island in the 1990s. Extreme censorship during and after this project has resulted in practically no archival sources that could help support the construction of a heritage narrative for Huemul Island, except through fragmented popular accounts and material remains. This is a rare example of the constructive and disruptive role of secrecy on heritage value, and the creative ways in which a heritage of failure can be studied.

Trinidad Rico is Assistant Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS) at Rutgers University, and Senior Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. Her areas of research in critical heritage include risk, ethnography, and the vernacularization of heritage discourses and expertise. Her current research projects focus on the mobilization of Islamic values in the Arabian Peninsula and the study of heritage and secrecy in South America.