Caroline Hannah will delivered the Alumni Spotlight Lecture on Tuesday, May 1, at 6 pm. Her talk was entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Adventures in Art, Craft, and Design History.”

What happens when your dissertation topic becomes a preservation project, is poised to become a cause célèbre but doesn’t, and its protector is convicted of fraud? In this talk, Caroline Hannah will reflect on the journey that led to and influenced her dissertation, “Henry Varnum Poor, Crow House, Craft, and Design,” and how applied research informs her current role as a curator at Bard Graduate Center. She will talk about ways of knowing, the peculiar hold of Crow House, challenges of research and writing, and exhibition making as a form of storytelling.

Caroline Hannah (BGC PhD ‘17) is an Associate Curator at Bard Graduate Center Gallery. She has worked in commercial, academic, and museum settings, including Virginia Commonwealth University (Craft History Teaching Fellow) and the Yale University Art Gallery (Acting Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts). Her doctoral work received generous support from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as a two-time Jane and Morgan Whitney Predoctoral Fellow), Smithsonian American Art Museum (James R. Renwick Predoctoral Fellow), Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design (Craft Research Fund), and Bard Graduate Center (Dissertation Writing Grant). Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Museum of Arts and Design’s Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design.