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.

Noam Osband gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Wednesday, January 17, at 12:15 pm. His talk was entitled “Film as Scholarship: My Beautiful Anthropological Dissertation.”

Visual anthropology has a long and storied history of using film. In this lecture, Osband will discuss approaches and trends within the field, beginning with Margaret Mead in the 1920s and ending with his film dissertation from 2017. Osband will describe different ways to utilize the unique capacity of film for transmitting academic truths.

Noam Osband is an anthropologist and filmmaker. His first feature, Adelante, a documentary about Mexican immigration to Philadelphia was shown on over twenty PBS affiliates, played at over thirty festivals, and was screened at over forty colleges. The film won awards at numerous festivals including the Catskill Mountain Film Fest, the Accolade Film Fest, and the International Festival of Ethnological Films. His most recent film, The Radical Jew, won Best Short Documentary Film at the Tallgrass and Charlotte Film Fest. Osband recently earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the first student in the school’s long history to submit a documentary film as a PhD dissertation.