Director’s Welcome

May 2023

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Greetings from Bard Graduate Center’s West 86th Street home. After the whirlwind of spring dissertations, qualifying papers, and commencement, and the joys of summer travel and research projects, we turn toward fall and our new academic year. As you might imagine, I am feeling the anticipation of new beginnings and enormous pride in all that BGC students, faculty, and staff have accomplished in the past year.

At thirty, Bard Graduate Center has firmly established itself as the premier American institution for graduate study in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. It is quite an achievement for a young institution, and one that owes much to Peter N. Miller, who joined BGC’s faculty in 2001, became chair of academic programs in 2006, and dean in 2008.

This summer, Peter assumed a new role as president of the American Academy of Rome. I am confident he will thrive there and that the Academy will benefit, as BGC has, from his leadership, innovation, intelligence, and boundless energy.

The BGC board of trustees and I, along with chief operating officer Janet Ozarchuk, chair of academic programs Deborah L. Krohn, and Bard College dean of graduate studies Christian Ayne Crouch, intend to use this moment of transition to reflect on the institution’s accomplishments and the heights it has yet to climb. We look forward to sharing our next steps with you.

With this annual report, I invite you to explore the research, publications, exhibitions, and events that BGC’s students, faculty, and staff have produced in the past year. I have been especially pleased with the excitement and energy around the fall and spring exhibitions, both online and in the gallery; the meticulously researched and beautifully written and illustrated catalogues that accompanied them; and the development of new

Public Humanities + Research events that link the BGC community with artists and scholars from other disciplines and institutions. Also in this edition of the Year in Review, I am delighted to introduce to you to two new faculty members, Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) and Drew Thompson.

As I review these achievements and look ahead to the 2023–24 academic year, when we will welcome an incoming class of twenty-four brilliant young scholars, launch a bevy of new publications and events, and open two new exhibitions—one that brings African metal arts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into conversation with works by contemporary African and African diasporic artists and another that brings new discoveries about the life and work of the great Sonia Delaunay to light—I see a very bright future indeed.

Susan Weber Founder and Director