Undergraduate Summer School
Dress—Design—Material Culture, 1850–2000

Bard Graduate Center is excited to announce its inaugural Summer School in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Open to advanced undergraduates (rising juniors and seniors) and recent college graduates, the program draws on resources at BGC and around New York City to provide an intensive, two-week, graduate-level program on material culture studies. Our topic for 2020 is “Dress—Design—Material Culture, 1850–2000.” The course will look at modern fashion and design through different approaches—methodological, technical, museological—that inform object-based study. Led by faculty members Michele Majer and Paul Stirton, this summer school will combine small seminars, collection and site visits, and materials workshops. Eligible for 3 upper-level undergraduate credits.

Program dates: June 29–July 10, 2020
Applications due: March 1, 2020

International Summer School for Graduate Students
Museum Objects as Evidence

Tthe Rijksmuseum, the University of Amsterdam, and Bard Graduate Center will offer an interdisciplinary Summer School devoted to object-based research within a museum setting. Experts in the field will provide participants with an exclusive and in-depth look at the technical, analytic, and interpretive work going on behind the scenes in the conservation studios, science laboratories, and curatorial departments. By focusing on how material objects provide primary evidence for historical research, this collaborative course introduces multiple techniques and perspectives for extracting the types of information museum objects generate and unraveling the many stories they can tell. Open to current graduate students and early career professionals

Program dates: July 27–August 7, 2020
Applications due: March 1, 2020

Visiting Fellowships
“How Do We know?”

Bard Graduate Center invites scholars from university, museum, and independent backgrounds with a PhD or equivalent professional experience to apply for non-stipendiary visiting fellowships, to be held during the 2020–21 academic year. The theme for this period is “How Do We Know?” Applicants are asked to address in a cover letter how their projected work will bear on this question. Visiting Fellowships, which are intended for scholars who have already secured means of funding, provide scholars with workspace in the Bard Graduate Center Research Center and enable them to be a part of our dynamic scholarly community in New York City. Eligible disciplines and fields of study include—but are not limited to—art history, architecture and design history, economic and cultural history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology. Visiting Fellowships may be awarded for anywhere from one month to the full academic year.

Applications due: March 1, 2020