Dear Colleagues,

This is the letter that usually comes with the announcement of the new academic year’s Seminar Series at Bard Graduate Center. But this is, of course, no usual year. In the fall, like most institutions we are staging no in-person events. Our graduate seminars are taking place, most on West 86th Street, and a few, where necessary, either because of large student numbers or because of faculty decisions, are happening remotely. In the fall, we will be focusing inward, with faculty work-in-progress presentations taking the place of invited guests. We hope to share this series with you each week via an email containing a video clip from the talk, selected reading, and a short Q&A with the speaker. But in the spring, we hope to return and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Seminar Series with a special line-up. Instead of individual talks spread over the year, each of the ten seminars—Modern Design History, Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora, Seminar in Cultural History, Museum Conversations, Renaissance and Early Modern Material Culture, The Global Middle Ages, Archaeological Encounters, Indigenous Arts in Transition, the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture, and the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture—will invite their guests on the same night for two shorter talks, a moderated conversation, and questions from the audience. You can look forward to receiving a poster in your inbox soon enough.

Finally, many of you have spoken here and written letters of recommendation for students interested in our program. This letter also kicks off our year’s recruiting program. We will be accepting students into our MA and PhD programs, with Zoomed open houses currently scheduled for October 18 (11 am–12:30 pm), November 17 (7:30–8:30 pm), and December 10 (7:30–8:30 pm).  Please encourage your students and others who would be good candidates for our programs to attend; we would be delighted to meet them.

I wish you good health and good fortune in this new and very complicated year. Let me end with some words of Novalis that seem particularly appropriate here, and now: “Every beloved object is the center of a paradise.”

Sincerely yours,

Prof. Peter N. Miller
Dean