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.

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.