November 7, 2025

Dear Alumni,

As you know, next Thursday, November 13, we will gather for our Autumn Alumni Event at the Museum of Arts and Design. The evening will begin with a tour of Designing Motherhood, an exhibition curated by Amber Winick (MA ’13). Our tour guide will be Elizabeth Koehn (MA ’20, current PhD candidate), who is the site curator for the show. If you haven’t RSVP’d, it isn’t too late! Click here. I look forward to seeing many of you next week!

Please share your updates via our online form. I’m always excited to learn about and celebrate your latest news!

All best,

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

Alumni Spotlight

This week, we celebrate the release of Rebecca Jumper Matheson’s (PhD ’22) latest monograph, titled Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps. Please find information below about a Costume Society of America event next week marking this publication. Congratulations, Rebecca!

Antonia Anagnostopoulos (MA ’24) has been awarded the Veronika Gervers Research Fellowship in Fashion & Textile History at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Her project entitled The Arcadian Lass: Recreating a Fustanella and its History explores making as an insightful academic practice. Guided by objects in the ROM collection, she will weave, embroider, and sew a jacket customarily worn with what is now known as the male national costume of Greece. Well done, Antonia!

Christianne Teague (MA ’19) was recently promoted to consignment director of design & decorative arts at Heritage Auctions and has relocated to the Beverly Hills office. Well done, Christianne!

Andrew Gardner (MA ’15) recently joined Public Art Fund as director of creative partnerships. Congratulations, Andrew!

Select Career Opportunities

The Art History Program in the School of Art, in Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor of art history of craft and design. Applicants may specialize in any aspect of craft history and its intersecting fields, including the study of design history, decorative arts, material culture, handicraft, craft production and fabrication, or ephemeral cultural production. The position is open in terms of chronological and geographical specialization, but we are especially interested in scholars whose research connects with the arts and craft traditions of the Americas broadly. Interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transregional approaches centering overlooked or marginalized histories are particularly welcome, as is scholarship that critically engages the migration of peoples, objects, and practices through time and space.

The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University (NYU) invites applications for a visiting assistant professorship in cultural criticism. NYU seeks candidates who are culture writers for a general readership and encourages applications from those who write at the intersection of popular culture and social critique, especially writers who examine the phenomena of influence and trend. Area(s) of focus might include fashion, style, media, technology, business, sports, or health. The candidate must have demonstrated ability to teach beyond technique, guiding students through the skills and practice of writing while also introducing cultural criticism as a method of inquiry that can help students think about their other areas of study. The selection committee will begin review of applications on November 15.

The Graduate Visual Culture Association (GVCA) at Queen’s University is seeking for “Old Futures,” the 25th annual Context and Meaning graduate research conference. Submit abstracts for fifteen-minute presentations that explore speculative, unrealized, or forgotten futures through visual and material cultures. The conference invites research papers from diverse disciplines, geographical areas, and timelines. Applications are due on November 21.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: careerservices
password: CareersBGC2025-6*=*

Select BGC Events

Elsewhere: Archive, Museum, and Catalyst of Change
A Leon Levy Foundation Lecture in Jewish Material Culture by Gabrielle A. Berlinger (University of North Carolina)
Thursday, November 13, at 6 pm

Since 2005, the building at 606 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, has been known as Elsewhere—a living museum and artist residency. However, from 1955–97, this three-story building was a second-hand store owned and run by Sylvia Gray, a Southern Jewish woman who filled the building with American material goods, from buttons and dishes to toys, ribbon, clothes, books, and more. Six years after she passed away in 1997, her grandson, George Scheer, opened the building’s locked doors, found all of its contents untouched, and decided to transform Sylvia’s material “collection” into an experimental museum and art space. By examining Elsewhere’s annual “Radical Seder” that weaves the building’s story and preservation philosophy into the ancient Passover ritual, as well as other instances of Jewish expression that intersect with Elsewhere’s material collection, Gabrielle Berlinger—in conversation with Scheer—considers how Elsewhere’s material world and creative preservation are informed by and reanimate Jewish values.

Ulm’s Development Pedagogy
A Lecture by Eric Anderson (Rhode Island School of Design)
Wednesday, November 19, at 6 pm

In this lecture, design historian Eric Anderson presents new research based on unpublished archival documents from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, dating to the 1960s and concerned with design for development in the Third World. The materials include diploma projects on development themes by Ulm students from India, Chile, Egypt, and Liberia, as well as reports of faculty consulting projects for the government of post-independence India. This little-studied body of work illustrates an approach to design for development that the West German school taught to its international student body. Ulm’s development pedagogy emphasized systems-based design methods applied to economic and social programs for poverty alleviation and nation-building. Existing scholarship on the short-lived but enduringly influential school has focused on Ulm’s role in remaking postwar German culture in the political context of Western alliances, but Anderson will draw attention to Ulm’s status as a global center for development education attuned to the politics of the Third World.

Open Houses for Prospective Students
November 9 (on Zoom) at 11 am
November 16 (in person) at 11 am

If you know any prospective students, I encourage you to share information about BGC’s Open Houses. These events give prospective students the opportunity to learn about BGC’s MA and PhD programs. Participants hear from faculty about their research and teaching and meet current students. In-person open houses also include a tour of the academic building and gallery.

Select External Events

Jeremy Musson presents Renishaw Hall in the Age of Sir George Sitwell
American Friends of Attingham
New York and Zoom
Friday, November 7, at 6 pm

Please join AFA for its fall benefit lecture, delivered by Jeremy Musson, author, broadcaster, educator and renowned British heritage consultant. Musson will shed new light on Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, home of the Sitwell family for 400 years. Sir George Sitwell (1860–1943) landowner and MP, is better known to history as the father of three famous writers, Dame Edith Sitwell, Sir Osbert Sitwell, and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. While the memoirs of his two eldest children paint a picture of an English eccentric, Sir George was an active and educated figure, a patron of John Singer Sargent and Sir Edwin Lutyens, and author of a now highly regarded and deeply researched treatise on historic formal Italian gardens On the Making of Gardens. He thoughtfully improved his family home and designed and laid out his own Italianate garden there, still maintained by his great-granddaughter Alexandra Sitwell Hayward. While he was an individualistic and aristocratic figure, new research reveals how deeply Sir George studied Italian art and architecture, how this knowledge informed his understanding of English design traditions, and how these interests also influenced the paths of those famous offspring. Over the past two years, Mr. Musson has had unrivaled access to the family papers and is working on a new biography of Sir George.

Conversations on Dress: Artisans and Designers Book Launch with Rebecca Jumper Matheson
Costume Society of America
On Zoom, Wednesday, November 12, at 7 pm

Costume Society of America Series Editor Kelly L. Reddy-Best will be joined by author Rebecca Jumper Matheson (PhD ’22) to discuss the latest book in the series, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps. Long before “slow fashion” entered the spotlight, William and Elizabeth Phelps pioneered durable, handcrafted American leathergoods and women’s sportswear that blended luxury, utility, and social impact from the 1940s through the 1960s. Artisans and Designers offers the first in-depth study of their legacy, linking their inventive designs and progressive business practices to broader themes of sustainability, postwar consumerism, and American identity.

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.