Faculty Reports

Susan Weber

I traveled to the Sèvres National Manufactory and Museum, outside of Paris, to continue selecting objects for our upcoming exhibition Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today. The show, scheduled for fall 2025, will present the history of the manufactory and its production of sculptural objects made by artists in various ceramic pastes. I am co-curating the project with Charlotte Vignon, director of heritage and collections at Sèvres. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue written by Tamara Préaud, who held the position of archivist for the past forty years at Sèvres. Vignon and I will edit this publication, which will include other texts written by additional sculpture and ceramic experts.

Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 finally opened at its third venue, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. This was an important showing, since Stoke was the birthplace of this remarkable ceramic—with pieces manufactured by local firms such as Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones from 1850 to 1900. Many of the Potteries Museum’s important majolica pieces were part of the exhibition. Majolica Mania was spawned more than seven years ago when fellow scholars, curators, and collectors congregated in Stoke to explore the possibility of mounting such a show.

The majolica team traveled back to Stoke and opened the exhibition there on October 7, 2022.

On June 20, 2023, I presented a paper on the friendship and careers of architect-designers E. W. Godwin, the subject of my dissertation, and William Burges. Titled “Reflections on E. W. Godwin and William Burges,” it was part of the “Burges and Friends Conference” at Worcester College, University of Oxford. This paper will be included in a special issue of the conference proceedings 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, to be published in autumn 2024.

Research continues on my upcoming show on Philip Webb, the first in-depth exhibition of this multitalented Arts and Crafts architect and designer. I wrote chapters on furniture, stained glass, glassware, and tiles for the complementary catalogue. Other authors including Julius Bryant and Tessa Wild were commissioned to contribute to the catalogue. Visits were made to two of Webb’s country houses: Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, and Standen in West Sussex. Other memorable stops included Emery Walker’s House, Kelmscott House, the William Morris Gallery, and Kelmscott Manor, which all contain furniture, metalwork, glassware, and tiles designed by Webb. Substantial research was done at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds Webb’s sketchbooks, letters, and architectural and design drawings.

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Peter N. Miller

Two writing projects dominated my schedule this year. The first was a very short book on newspaper weather maps as a way to understand historical thinking. This will be published by MER. in Ghent, continuing a collaborative relationship that began with production of the exhibition catalogue for Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? (2022). The second also followed a 2022 BGC exhibition, On Conservation as a Human Science. Starting with writing done for the exhibition’s website and book, the project was expanded with two new chapters and the incorporation of additional material.

In May, I took up a long-delayed offer of a visiting professorship at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Invited to give the E. H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute, London, in June 2023, I devoted much of the year to trying out parts of the argument in front of different audiences in Amsterdam, Chicago, and Paris. The lectures in their final form will be published by Princeton University Press. Finally, my next big project, on the history and meaning of research, will launch at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago, which will host a large international conference in November 2023.

Jeffrey L. Collins

In the fall, I co-taught “Approaches to the Object” with Andrew Morrall and offered the seminar “Versailles: Palace and People,” paired with an eight-part film series, “Palace and Popcorn,” which explores how the domaine and its inhabitants have been imagined on screen. The spring term was devoted to exploring the feasibility of a revised second edition of the BGC textbook History of Design (Yale University Press, 2013), including an evaluation of the existing text to identify desired changes and additions.

Publications during the 2022–23 year included two chapters for the six-volume survey A Cultural History of Furniture, edited by former BGC research fellow Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury. For the volume on furniture in the Age of Exploration (1500–1700), my chapter, “Visual Representations,” addressed media ranging from design drawings and pattern books to frescoes. For the volume on the Age of Enlightenment (1700–1800), my chapter, “The Public Setting,” explored furniture in churches and synagogues, libraries, museums, shops, schools, taverns, coffee houses, and restaurants, among other sites.

In March, I addressed the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in St. Louis. My paper, titled “Seeing Is Believing: Marchionni and Bergondi at the Crossing of St. Peter’s,” presented archival evidence for a previously unknown artistic project at the heart of the Vatican basilica in connection with the Holy Year of 1775. In July, I chaired a panel at the 16th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Rome. To contribute to the theme of “Antiquity and the Shaping of the Future in the Age of Enlightenment,” my panel focused on “Excavating the Past / Making the Modern: Antiquity into Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Drawing.”

Ivan Gaskell

In the fall 2022 semester, I taught “Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting” and “From the Arctic to Oceania: Overseas Visitors in Early Modern Europe.” The former examined the role of material items in the emergence of disciplines of study in museums and research universities. The latter considered visitors to Europe from North and South America, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

Because I was in the Research Institute, my teaching in the spring 2023 semester was confined to advising PhD students and one student for a qualifying paper. I completed a book manuscript on philosophical aesthetics, “Mindprints: Henry David Thoreau and Material Culture.”

I was appointed the delegate of the American Society for Aesthetics to the American Council of Learned Societies and to board membership of the European Research Council project “The Kinetic Author: Transmediations of Authorship in the Modern Cultural Sphere.”

I presented “The Duchamp Fallacy: A Response to Miguel Dos Santos” and chaired the session

“Defining Art” at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in Portland, Oregon, in November 2022. In April 2023, I presented “‘To build still more deliberately’: Henry David Thoreau’s Philosophy of Shelter” at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in Philadelphia. In May 2023, I delivered “Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts symposium

“The Catalogue Raisonné: A Social Practice” in Washington, D.C.

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I recently published “America’s Virtues” (review of Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History, 2021), Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022); “Aesthetics, Ontology, and a Museum Acquisition,” in Aesthetic Literacy, Volume II: Out of Mind, ed. Valery Vinogradovs (Mongrel Matter, 2023); and “A Seventeenth-Century Likeness of Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship,” in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Darren Hudson Hick (Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, 2023).

In the summer, I rusticated at my home in Massachusetts to continue writing a book on the subject of museum values.

Aaron Glass

This academic year began with a fall residency in BGC’s Research Institute, during which I continued writing annotations about global museum collections for my planned critical edition of Franz Boas’s 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. The project, which I co-direct, was awarded a 2022 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, with which I am coordinating the development of new navigation and accessibility features for the edition’s digital platform. In spring, I taught two BGC courses, “Objects in Context II,” and (with Drew Thompson) “Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture.” Additional service to BGC included participation in a public event on George Kubler’s classic book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the

History of Things and three tours of the newly renovated Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

After Covid-related delays, I resumed my role as the chair of the faculty council for the biannual Otsego Institute Workshop for Native American Art History, held in October 2022 at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. In addition, I presented at two conferences: the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, at which I organized an invited session in honor of Ira Jacknis, and a symposium, “Surrogates: Embodied Histories of Sculpture in the Short Twentieth Century,” hosted by Yale University’s Department of the History of Art.

Finally, I published four essays: a chapter on digital media, museum collections, and Indigenous knowledge in the first volume of the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians; an article on Edward Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters in the Getty Research Journal; a reflection on co-curating BGC’s Focus Exhibition Conserving Active Matter for Indiana University’s digital curriculum initiative, Engaging Religion; and an obituary (with BGC alumna Hadley Jensen) for my friend and colleague Ira Jacknis in Museum Anthropology

Over the summer, I continued more annotation writing and enjoyed overdue family travel to New Zealand.

After The Story Box: Aaron Glass Wins Award from National Endowment for the Humanities

In 2022, Bard Graduate Center associate professor Aaron Glass was awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast. NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. This grant will support the development of additional features and extensions for a multimedia platform specifically designed to support Indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

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Glass’s project, “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography,” is codirected with Judith Berman (University of Victoria) and continues the work he presented in a 2018 BGC Focus Exhibition entitled The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Making of Anthropology.

Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) is one of the first holistic ethnographies based on fieldwork. The text brought together data on Kwakwaka’wakw social structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eyewitness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s Indigenous collaborator George Hunt. The goal of this project is to reunite the scattered archival material with the original text and with the Indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. It promises new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums, textual repositories, and contemporary Indigenous communities.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Freyja Hartzell

I published my first book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things with MIT Press in November 2022. The book’s production was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. A related article, extending the book’s culminating discussion of Munich designer Richard Riemerschmid’s personal and career crises during the Nazification of Germany in 1933, appeared in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte in September 2022. I gave a book talk at Yale University in late November.

During the fall, I continued work on my new book project Doll Parts: Designing Likeness and taught the first in a series of courses in support of my related Focus Exhibition Dollatry, opening at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in February 2025. In conjunction with this, I inaugurated BGC’s first Faculty in Focus series, inviting and collaborating with three expert guests on the topic of “Dolls and Human Likeness” and sharing this exploration with the BGC community in a series of lectures and workshops. In Spring 2023, I taught my second “In Focus” course on the exhibition topic, and held a related symposium—“Doll Parts: Playing with Human Likeness”—that drew together current BGC students and Faculty in Focus guests from the fall semester, along with new scholars on dolls, robotics, and specialists in prosthetic technologies. In a position paper titled “Image and Likeness: Dolls Picturing Power,” I exposed hidden power relations implicit in photographs, illustrations, and advertisements depicting both children and adults interacting with dolls.

This summer, I further developed material for my second book during a residential research fellowship at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. I presented a related paper, “‘Nothing but a DOLL!’ Defining and Designing Likeness,” at “Toys Matter: The Power of Playthings,” the International Toy Research Association’s 9th World Conference in Rochester, August 8–10, 2023.