November 20, 2025

Dear Alumni,

I was thrilled to see many of you last week at our Autumn Alumni Event! We met at the current Museum of Art & Design exhibition Designing Motherhood, which was curated by Amber Winick (MA ’13), and we enjoyed an excellent tour of the show by its site curator Elizabeth Koehn (MA ’20, current PhD candidate). Our evening concluded with a reception high above Columbus Circle during which we had a chance to catch up over wine and cheese.

As always, please share your updates via our online form! Lastly, if you know anyone applying to BGC for next year, please remind them that the application deadline is December 15!

All best,

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

Alumni Spotlight

A recent publication by Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18 and current BGC assistant professor) titled The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court has been nominated for CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Award, which recognizes an especially distinguished English-language book in the history of art. Congratulations!

The exhibition catalogue for Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, edited by Laura Microulis (PhD ’16) and Waleria Dorogova, has been nominated for a CAA award: the Alfred J. Barr Jr. Award for an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in English by a museum, library, or collection. In addition to Laura’s contributions, the catalogue features chapters by several BGC alumni including Noah Dubay (MA ’21), Maude Bass-Krueger (MA ’15), and PhD candidate Geoffrey Ripert.

Select Career Opportunities

The Worcester Art Museum seeks an accomplished and engaged curator to lead the care, research, and interpretation of its distinguished arms and armor collection. This full-time position is open at the assistant or associate curator level, depending upon experience. A successful candidate will advance the presentation and understanding of the collection through exhibitions, research, and public programs.

The History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute invites applications for a full-time tenure-track faculty position at the assistant professor rank in art, design, visual, and/or material culture to begin in Fall 2026. The department seeks a scholar working on transregional or transnational exchanges prior to 1900 to enrich and complement the department and its curriculum. Fields of specialization are open, and the department encourages scholars working on South-South, East-West, and South-North exchanges to apply.

The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, co-sponsored by SUNY-Oneonta and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, examines the impact of baseball on American culture from interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives. Proposals for papers are invited from all disciplines and on all topics. Submission is by abstract (be sure to include complete contact information). Abstracts should be narrative, limited to one type-written page. All presentations should be designed to fit into a 20-minute panel segment. The deadline for submission is December 31, 2025.

The Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L), in collaboration with the Corda Foundation, is establishing a Poetry Center, a new initiative dedicated to celebrating Hispanic and Latin American poetry and advancing the legacy of David Rosenmann-Taub through his poetry, music, and drawings. The position is grant funded and reports to the director & CEO.

The HSM&L is seeking a head of the Poetry Center who will lead the Center’s programs, exhibitions, publications, and digital initiatives, while also serving as steward of Rosenmann-Taub’s archive.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2025-6*=*

Select BGC Events

BGC Book Sale!
Select BGC publications are on sale and the store is offering free domestic shipping for all publications this Friday, November 28 through Monday, December 1. Your 40% alumni discount applies to all purchases except those items already on sale. Use code ALUMNI at checkout.

Replica – Relic: A presentation by Dania Shihab (Artist)
Wednesday, December 3, 6 pm

Without consent from the British Museum, artist Dania Shihab surreptitiously took 3D scans of several Mesopotamian artifacts—items “acquired” from her homeland of southern Iraq. These scans became the blueprints for a series of reconstructed sculptures, enhanced with interactive sensors that allow her to reanimate the sonic memories embedded within each object. Composing with an ancient musical tuning system that was documented on cuneiform tablets, she imagines a soundscape of southern Iraq unadulterated by colonial interference. In this lecture, Shihab will outline her process for researching, fabricating, and activating these objects as an alternative approach to repatriation and how her work fits into a larger set of questions around decolonization and stewardship.

Buttenhausen: The Material Afterlife of a German Jewish Community
A Leon Levy Foundation Lecture in Jewish Material Culture by Gabrielle A. Berlinger (University of North Carolina)
Thursday, December 11, 6 pm

This talk explores the Jewish material afterlife of Buttenhausen, a small rural village in southwest Germany. This village was home to Jews from 1787 until 1942, when Gabrielle Berlinger’s great-grandfather was the last Jewish resident deported. Today, no Jews live in Buttenhausen, but the work of several Christian residents has led to the establishment of a small Jewish museum, as well as the memorialization of Buttenhausen’s former Jewish residents through plaques on the outer walls of houses and imbedded in sidewalks, all stops on a self-guided historical walking tour. This presentation explores the buildings and material objects, both in the village and beyond, that continue to evoke the memory of Jewish life in this village.

Select External Events

Who Makes a Company’s Art? – Meditations on Artists, Commerce, and the East India Company, 1750–1850: A Bettman Lecture by Holly Shaffer (Brown University)
Columbia University
Monday, December 1, 6:15 pm

Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lecture Series is an annual program of monthly lectures in art history sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor. Lectures take place in-person at 6:15 pm in lecture hall 612 in Schermerhorn Hall on Columbia’s Morningside Campus. All Bettman lectures are open to the public and are followed by a reception. The Bettman Lecture Series is coordinated by two graduate students, serving on a committee with two faculty members, who act in an advisory role. These are volunteer positions designed to foster community and intellectual engagement within the department. The series is intended to be a student-run initiative, and the selection of student members is in the hands of the serving graduate students.

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.