February 5, 2026

Dear Alumni,

I hope the new year is off to a pleasant start for each of you. I spent the first days of 2026 in Savannah, Charleston, and Miami, and have since returned to deadlines and much colder temperatures! On a more positive note, however, the new year also brings the return of BGC’s public programming, which started off with an excellent Alumni Spotlight Lecture by Rebecca Jumper Matheson (PhD ’22) about the research and thinking behind her latest publication, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps.

I’m sure many of you will be attending the College Art Association conference in Chicago later this month. It’s always a great time for BGC alums to meet up! Professor Deborah Krohn hopes as many of us as possible will join her at the Chicago Athletic Association on Thursday, February 19, at 7:30 pm. Please RSVP by emailing her at deborah.krohn@bgc.bard.edu.

If you are presenting, leading a session, or serving on a panel at CAA, please provide details and we will share a “BGC Itinerary” for the conference by email on Tuesday, February 17.

As always, please share all of your latest updates, related to CAA or not, via the online form.

All best,

Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

If you are in Chicago for CAA—or otherwise—don’t miss Bruce Goff: Material Worlds at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-curated by Craig Lee (MA ’12). Well done, Craig!

Angela Hermano Crenshaw (MA ’23 and current BGC PhD Candidate) presented a paper titled “Mrs. Funston in Filipino Costume: Philippine Textiles, American Fashion, and American Imperialism in the Philippines” at the annual American Studies Association conference, this year held in San Juan, Puerto Rico with the theme “Late-Stage American Empire.” Angela’s panel was organized by the Material Culture Caucus. Congratulations, Angela!

Select Career Opportunities

Call for Papers for Graduate Symposium @ BGC
Students at BGC are organizing a graduate symposium later this spring. Titled Sensing Matters: Bodies, Experiences, and Objects, this symposium invites papers from area graduate students that explore how material things become animated through sensory engagement and how attention to the sensorium alters our understanding of them. This half-day graduate symposium will take place in person on Friday, May 1, 2026, at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Those interested in submitting papers for consideration should email graduate.symposium@bgc.bard.edu. The deadline for submissions is Friday, February 27, 2026. Accepted speakers will be notified in early March.

The MA Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum invite applications for a graduate symposium titled The Environmental Turn in Art and Design History. The conference seeks papers that engage with the environmental turn. During times of displacement, such as pandemics and climate disasters, makers have continually responded to environmental and economic pressures by returning to their histories of material and visual engagements with the non-human. How does one revisit the place of animal- and plant-derived images, design patterns, and materials in art and design histories and historiographies? How does one (re)write histories of ornament by considering the zoomorphic and biomorphic as a major impetus in image-making? Applications should email proposals (with the phrase “Voorsanger Proposal” in the subject line) for 20-minute papers to brodyd@newschool.edu by February 15. Proposals should include a paper title, abstract (250 words maximum), author’s name, and an abbreviated CV. Please note that titles of accepted papers will appear online, in social media, and in the digital program, and thus should be concise and clearly reflect the contents of the paper.

The Victorian Society’s New York (VSNY) chapter invites university students and recent graduates to submit proposals by March 2 for its 2026 Emerging Scholars in-person evening event on May 5. The nonprofit VSNY, founded in 1966, supports scholarship about every aspect of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century culture, including architecture, literature, theatre, fine and decorative art, immigration, economics, politics, education, gender roles, reform movements, music, fashion, and food. Topics for recent event winners have included globetrotting nineteenth-century cabinetmakers and early 1900s representations (and misrepresentations) of Indigenous Arizonans. Send 200-word proposals (preference given to American/New York topics) and CVs by March 2 to info@vicsocny.org.

The University of Oregon Art History Student Association invites graduate students to submit proposals for its upcoming symposium, Art Works: Labor of Creation. This symposium seeks to explore the intersections of artistic production and labor practices across chronologies and geographies. While labor is central to artistic production, it can often be rendered invisible either as a result of temporal distance between the production of the work and the contemporary audience and/or the notion of art as a self-fulfilling profession. These issues impact art’s reception, compensation, and socio-cultural significance. In the contemporary moment of economic concern characterized by gig work and an increased demand for collective organization, as well as in light of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Oregon’s Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation, this symposium aims to examine art historical forms of artistic labor, craft, collective production (workshops and guilds), and labor injustices. Applicants should submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, a paper title, and a current CV to ahsa@uoregon.edu by February 15, 2026.

The NYU Department of Anthropology invites applications to its one-day workshop Anthropology in Color. With an eye to diversifying the profession, each year NYU Anthropology offers a one-day workshop focusing on understanding and demystifying the graduate school application process. Anyone considering a PhD in any of the four fields of the discipline, from advanced undergraduate students to those already holding an MA/MS are encouraged to apply. The program encourages students from historically under-represented backgrounds, those who are first-generation college students, veterans, scholars with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ scholars to apply. The program especially encourages scholars in the New York tri-state area, as travel funds are not currently available. The symposium aims to demystify how to prepare a successful application, how to undertake advanced scholarly research, and careers both inside and outside the academy.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.

username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2025-6*=*

Select BGC Events

Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds
On view in the BGC Gallery through May 24, 2026

Event Horizon: Early Modern Warfare and the Monumental Print
A lecture by Carolyn Yerkes (Princeton)
Wednesday, February 11, 6 pm

When two technologies converged in the first half of the sixteenth century—artillery warfare and monumental printmaking—a new genre was the result. The monumental siege print was an experiment in how to depict distance between enemies as the defining condition of war. In this talk, Carolyn Yerkes explores a series of enormous woodcuts created in the German-speaking lands of northern Europe during a period of constant war, political turmoil, and religious strife.

When Alex Met Candy: The Ottoman Version of the Story of Alexander and Candace
A Ravi and Seran Trehan Lecture in the Arts of the Islamic World by Edhem Eldem (Columbia)
Wednesday, February 18, 6 pm

This lecture explores a link between Evliya Çelebi’s frequent references to the myth of Queen Kaydafe and Ahmedi’s late fourteenth-century İskendername (Book of Alexander), and it unveils the complex and unexpected ways in which Ahmedi adapted and radically changed the age-old Alexander Romance. In Ahmedi’s telling, Queen Kaydafe stands in for Candace, whose confrontation with Alexander appears in every version of the Romance, East and West. Yet Ahmedi’s İskendername is the first work where the story’s universal “happy ending” turns into a tragedy, fatal to Kaydafe/Candace. Digging through layers of earlier and later texts, Eldem’s investigation reveals how Ahmedi came up with this innovative—and misogynist—twist and laid the foundation for a new and original version of the story, which would spread throughout Ottoman culture and literature at least until the end of the nineteenth century.

MA and PhD Information Session for Prospective Students
Tuesday, February 24, 6–7 pm

If you know any prospective students, I encourage you to share information about BGC’s information session this February. Led by Professor Deborah Krohn and director of admissions Keith Condon, this event will highlight BGC’s object-centered program. There will also be a tour of the library and academic building.

Shop the BGC Store!

Visit our online store at store.bgc.bard.edu for 40% off all items. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive the discount.

Sign up for Gaggle!

Gaggle.mail is an opt-in list-serv that serves as a place to share job openings, conference attendance, published books/articles, and exhibition openings directly with fellow alums. It’s a communication forum for alumni, by alumni. To circulate your news in the Gaggle group, send an email to bgcalumni@gaggle.email.