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.

Marking its twentieth birthday, this symposium examines the elements of practice and theory that have come to define the Bard Graduate Center. An array of speakers from across the national, disciplinary, and institutional spectrum put the achievements of the past twenty years in context, and also outlined paths into the future. The morning session concentrated on issues relevant to the future of exhibitions, examining display and interpretation, publishing and the digital challenge, and how philosophy might inform museum practice. The afternoon focused on the role of the research institute, ways of defining good research, research as a way of life, and the necessity of research for teaching.

Susan Weber
Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center
Welcome

Nina Stritzler-Levine
Director, Bard Graduate Center Gallery/Gallery Publications
Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going

Taco Dibbits
Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Playful Simplicity: The Making of the New Rijksmuseum

Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, Architecture & Design, and Director, Research and Development, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Exhibitions for the Real World: Contemporary Design at MoMA

Jill Shaw
Co-General Editor, Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), and Research Associate, Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago
Meta Monet: The Journey from Print to Digital at The Art Institute of Chicago

Ivan Gaskell
Professor, Curator and Head of the Focus Project, Bard Graduate Center
The Museum of Big Ideas

Peter N. Miller
Dean and Professor, Bard Graduate Center
Research as a Calling

Norton Batkin
Vice President and Dean of Graduate Studies; Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art History;
Director, Philosophy Program; Bard College

Joachim Nettelbeck
Former Secretary of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin)
The Administration of Serendipity: What is a Research Institute?

Harriet Zuckerman
Professor Emerita of Sociology, Columbia University, and former Senior Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Basic Research with Potentials of Relevance

Michael Shanks
Professor of Classics and Classical Archaeology, Stanford University
Research as Performance

Panel Discussion