Student Travel and Research: Talia

Perry (MA ’23) Studies

Tudor Chimneys

Travel has long been an important component of a Bard Graduate Center education. All MA students have the option of going on a BGC-sponsored trip to Europe in the summer between their first and second years. This past summer students traveled to Paris for a weeklong study of museums and historic homes led by professor Jeffrey Collins and then continued to the Greek island of Despotiko for a week of archaeological study with professor Caspar Meyer (see page 40 for more details about BGC’s Summer Field School). These trips afforded students the opportunity to become familiar with some of the great collections, museums, and historic sites outside of the United States and gave them hands-on, practical experience.

BGC also supports student travel for individual research. These trips often provide students with their only firsthand experience of objects that are central to their qualifying papers or dissertations.

In February 2023, Talia Perry (MA ’23) traveled to England to visit Tudor chimneys in preparation for her qualifying paper titled “Rooftop Fancy and Folly: Tudor Chimney Stack as Device and Discourse.” Perry is a practicing architect, but as she said is common at BGC, her interests expanded during the course of her studies, in particular to include the history of technology and how changes in technology and material production alter social structures and the way people relate to each other.

In professor Andrew Morrall’s fall 2022 course, “The Arts of the Tudor Court,” Perry encountered a photograph of Tudor chimney stacks and wanted to know more. She found discussions of Tudor architecture or of English chimneys that gave glancing references to the stacks, but no scholarship on the subject of Tudor chimneys specifically. She knew she needed to see the structures in person.

During her weeklong trip, Perry saw thirteen Tudor chimneys. She woke at 6 am every morning and traveled by train and bus to various locales, trekking more than one hundred miles by the end of the week. She was able to get “up close and personal” with a few of the chimneys, including the tower stacks at both Framlingham Castle and Lambeth Palace (which she viewed by peering down at its rooftop from a neighboring church tower). Ironically, she hates heights and found herself practicing yoga breathing and inching along the sides of the walls at many of these sites.

The Student Travel and Research Fund covered Perry’s plane ticket and some of her hotel stays. She was very frugal and stretched the budget so that she could see a variety of chimneys stacks during her short trip. According to Perry, “It was really important to me to see the chimneys in person, in part because I was very interested in the lives of the craftspeople who constructed them and their handcrafted nature. Despite having access to a lot of images of the chimneys, the photographs are usually taken from far away and the focus is not on mortar joint or the texture of the brick.” She continued, “I felt I could not do the project justice without having seen the structures with my own eyes.”

Helen Polson

In 2022–23, I taught “Writing Objects” in the fall and spring semesters, which is a required course for all incoming MA and PhD students that develops the knowledge of forms and proficiency in techniques required for effective graduate-level writing. I enjoyed helping students refine assignments, essays, qualifying papers, and dissertations, and was especially pleased to work with a number of students who successfully applied to and gave conference papers, wrote book and exhibition reviews, and completed catalogue essays and journal articles for publication. This year, my work at BGC expanded to include editing interpretive texts for the BGC exhibitions Threads of Power, Shaped by the Loom, Staging the Table in Europe, and the upcoming SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige. I also worked with colleagues in publications and Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions on texts for the Threads of Power and Staging the Table catalogues and the online exhibition for Shaped by the Loom

Mei Mei Rado

I joined the BGC faculty in January 2023. In February, my article “Botanic Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China” appeared in the edited volume Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility and Change (Bloomsbury, 2023). In March, I gave a talk titled “Ornaments from the Western

Ocean: Rococo as a Qing Imperial Style in the Decorative Arts” during the symposium “Rococo Across Borders: Designers and Makers,” which was co-organized by French Porcelain Society and Furniture History Society and took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In May, I spoke about one of my research projects, “Chinese Dress Refashioned in Europe: From Eighteenth-Century Indoor Robes to Twentieth-Century Couture,” at the “(Re)Made in China: Material Dis:connections, Art, and Creative Reuse” conference at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. I also contributed research and a catalogue essay on nineteenth-century Qing court arts and culture to the British Museum’s exhibition China’s Hidden Century and presented a paper, “The Japan Connection: Meiji-Period Arts and the Late Qing Court,” in the related symposium “China’s 1800s: Material and Visual Culture” in June.

With the support of a three-year grant offered by the Society of the Antiquaries of London, I traveled to Taipei and Hong Kong in July to conduct research on the development of the qipao dress in the mid-twentieth century. Yale University Press will publish my book The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles in the Qing Court in fall 2024.