Faculty

Andrew Morrall. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Susan Weber

2020–22 was unlike any other time in Bard Graduate Center’s history. It was certainly the most challenging, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced our institution into remote teaching and research in 2020, followed by a concerted effort to return to on-site education. Despite its many difficulties, the institution continued to thrive because of the dedication of our students, faculty, and staff.

I finished the William Watt (1834–85) entry for the Dictionary of British and Irish Furniture Makers, 1500–1914. He was best known for his Aesthetic furniture designed by E.W. Godwin, the subject of my doctoral dissertation. I discovered unknown biographical facts and rounded out the details of his London cabinet-making and upholstery business. Another Godwin-related subject that I revisited was the life and work of George Freeth Roper, an understudied Manchester architect and designer who worked in Godwin’s office at the beginning of his career. His furniture was often confused with Godwin’s. I worked up my preliminary research into a Brown Bag Lunch talk entitled “George Freeth Roper (1843–92): Slavish Imitator or Undervalued Architect/Designer.”

Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, finally opened in the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in the fall of 2021. Its three-volume catalogue, which I edited, won the 2021 Historians of British Art Book Prize for an outstanding multi-authored book on the history of British art, architecture, and visual culture. The show subsequently traveled to the Walters Art Museum, where it opened in March and received ongoing positive reviews, including from the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. It will remain at the Walters through August 2022 and then transfer to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stokeon-Trent, England, where it will be on view from October 2022 until January 2023. BGC’s curatorial and development teams worked closely with the Potteries Museum staff to ensure that our exhibition would have a showing in Stoke-on-Trent, where so many of the objects in the exhibition were created.

In addition to my work on Majolica Mania, I completed and presented a paper on “Sèvres Majolica Production under the Second Empire” in September 2021 for the BGC symposium on French influence on majolica production in England. The research period was particularly problematic since the French archives were closed to visiting scholars. I wish to thank director Charlotte Vignon and her archivists for assisting me in accessing the papers of the Sèvres majolica atélier.

In 2021 I also began research for the upcoming 2026 BGC exhibition on Philip Webb, Arts and Crafts Architect and Designer. It will showcase the many talents of Webb, ranging from remarkable buildings to beautiful furniture, stained glass, glassware, and book bindings.

As for teaching, in 2020–21, I led a year-long seminar for two first-year students on the history of the chair. We examined royal thrones from the ancient world to contemporary mass-produced seating forms. Questions of connoisseurship, materials, ergonomics, construction, hygiene, and affordability were all part of our lively weekly discussions. We used chapters from Witold Rybczinski’s Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair (2017) to frame our sessions. Students led the study of twentieth-century seating forms with a series of presentations.

Jeffrey Collins

Starting in fall 2020, I assisted Deborah Krohn with graduate admissions and convened both the fall and spring semesters of “Objects in Context” as part of a thorough revision of our first-year core curriculum undertaken with Catherine Whalen. With Andrew Morrall, I co-taught the field seminar “Readings in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture,” exploring both established and emerging approaches to objects and related images in Europe ca. 1500–1800.

On my own, I offered seminars on “The Grand Tour”—an appropriately virtual form of travel during a pandemic—in which participants followed specific travelers with special attention to the material, educational, and experiential aspects of moving around Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. A further seminar on “Fire! Staging the Hearth in Eighteenth-Century France,” began laying the groundwork for a forthcoming Focus Exhibition on French eighteenth-century gilt bronze firedogs, scheduled to open in February 2027. In May 2022, after a two-year hiatus, I led eleven BGC MA students on the intensive, tenday Bard Travel Program in Paris, organized in conjunction with the École du Louvre.

On the research front, I contributed a chapter entitled “Winckelmann et la peinture: construire le sens d’un art disparu” (Winckelmann and Painting: Making Sense of a Lost Art) to the volume Winckelmann et l’oeuvre d’art: Matériaux et types (Winckelmann and the Work of Art: Materials and Genres), edited by Cécile Colonna and Daniela Gallo and published in May 2021 by the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. My essay traced the Prussian scholar’s changing approach to understanding and evaluating

ancient painting in the face of a disjuncture among the slender physical evidence, largely from the Roman period, and the dictates of an aesthetic theory predicated on white marble sculpture understood to be Greek. Two further essays appeared in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Furniture, edited by former BGC research fellow Christina Anderson and published in March 2022: a chapter on visual representations of furniture for the volume covering 1500–1700, and a chapter on furniture in the public setting for the volume on the eighteenth century.

Ivan Gaskell

In fall 2020, I taught “Curatorial Practice and American Art at the Metropolitan Museum.” A different curator from the American Wing joined the class remotely each week. In spring 2021, I was attached to the Bard Graduate Center Research Institute and worked on a book project entitled Museum Values. My fall 2021 courses were “History and Material Culture: New Directions” and (with Soon Kai Poh) “In Focus: Conserving Active Matter.” In the former, every contributor to the Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture joined the class remotely, three each week. In spring 2022, I taught “University Museums: Collections in Academia and their Uses.” Each week a museum director or curator from universities in North America and Europe talked remotely with the class. With Soon Kai Poh, I also taught “Damage, Decay, Conservation.”

As was the case for everyone, the pandemic radically affected my activities in the academic years 2020–21 and 2021–22. I could not take up my usual residence in Göttingen as a permanent fellow of the Advanced Study Institute in either summer or deliver the typical number of lectures. I presented papers online at the American Society for Aesthetics annual national conference in fall 2020 and its eastern division conference in spring 2021. My spring 2021 fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, was postponed due to the pandemic, but I presented a paper in the fellows’ inaugural workshop online in May 2021. I gave a paper remotely in June at the Advanced Study Institute, Göttingen. In November, I contributed a paper online at a symposium held in Madrid on Hans Heinrich Thyssen as an art collector.

Owing to the illness of the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Advanced Study Institute of the Georg-August University, Göttingen, I was elected to the chair in the fall of 2020 when the Institute was threatened following cuts in funding. Despite an international campaign in fall 2021, the university closed the Institute. The director and the Scientific Advisory

Board of the Central Collections of the Georg-August University, Göttingen, of which I am a member, were successful in securing a large grant from the German federal government for the building and operation of the Forum Wissen (Knowledge Forum), the future central collections facility for the university that opened in May 2022.

My publications between 2020 and 2022 include “Living or Dead,” in Luca Del Baldo’s The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality: Atlas of the Iconic Turn (De Gruyter, 2020); “Harvard, History, and a House Museum,” in LaurelX: A Non-Traditional Festschrift in Celebration of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ed. Christopher Allison, John Bell, and Sarah Ann Carter (Harvard University Archives, 2020); “Cracking Up with Piet Mondrian,” in Proceedings of the 34th World Congress of Art History, Beijing, 2016 (Beijing, 2020), Vol. 3; “Active Matter: Some Initial Philosophical Considerations” (with A.W. Eaton) in Conserving Active Matter, ed. Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (University of Chicago Press, 2022); “Toward an Aesthetics of Degradation” (with A.W. Eaton) in Conserving Active Matter: Essays (Bard Graduate Center, 2022:); “New Galleries of Dutch and Flemish art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” the Burlington Magazine 164, 2022; “Göttinger Dämmerung,” Merkur, March 17, 2022; and “The Brutish Museums,” West 86th online, April 6, 2022. My co-editor Sarah Anne Carter and I received the 2021 Allen G. Noble Book Award for best-edited publication from the International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture for The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Aaron Glass

The anni horribilis of 2020–22 were dominated by Covid-19 and, for me, three other big “C”s: colonialism, cannibalism, and conservation. In the middle of this period my new book, Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance, was published by UBC Press in July 2021. Bard Graduate Center hosted an online book launch later that fall. I’ve since given talks about the book at the University of Connecticut, for Nanaimo Ladysmith Public Schools, and at the 2021 American Anthropological Association conference. With BGC colleagues, I continued curatorial work on the exhibition Conserving Active Matter by helping select global Indigenous materials for loan and editing the companion volume’s section on Indigenous ontologies. Additionally, I published two essays for the project (one for print, one for the website) on the notion of Indigenous ontologies of active matter.

Aaron Glass. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

After a fall 2020 residency in BGC’s Research Institute, I co-taught two spring 2021 courses: “Objects of Colonial Encounter in North America” with BGC/American Museum of Natural History Postdoctoral Fellow Hadley Jensen, and “Unsettling Things: Expanding Conversations in Studies of the Material World” with Meredith Linn. The latter is an ambitious new course bringing together BGC faculty and visiting speakers to explore diverse forms of critical material culture scholarship; I coordinated this course again in spring 2022 with Caspar Meyer. This academic year, I also taught “The Social Lives of Things: Anthropology of Art and Material Culture” and “Exhibiting Culture(s): Anthropology in and of the Museum.”

Over the past two years, I participated in numerous online conferences and international workshops, including People: A Global Dialogue on Museums and Their Publics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology and Museums at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History; and The Museum as Archive: Using the Past in the Present and Future at the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. I also delivered lectures to classes at Columbia University, NYU/IFA’s Conservation Center, and University of Alaska. In the realm of public scholarship, I was interviewed for a documentary film about the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and I produced two podcast conversations related to Indigenous art: one for SmartHistory and the other for BGC’s Fields of the Future series.

Freyja Hartzell

During the 2020–21 academic year, my ongoing research on glass and transparency in modern design was published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes: “Cleanliness, Clarity—and Craft: Material Politics in German Design, 1919–1939,” in the Journal of Modern Craft (December 2020); “Enemy of Secrets: The Invisible Force of Interwar Glass,” in the Journal of Design History (May 2021); “Empty by Design: Transition, Transformation, Transparency,” in I Am All of Glass—Marianne Brandt and the Art of Glass Today (Jovis, 2020); and “Experience, Poverty, Transparency: The Modern Surface of Interwar Glass,” in Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of the Modern Surface (Bloomsbury, 2021).

“The Emperor’s New Glass: Transparency as Substance and Symbol in Interwar Design,” was recently published in Material Modernity: Innovative Visual and Material Work in the Weimar Republic (Bloomsbury, 2022), and “Dürer, Goethe, and the Poetics of Richard Riemerschmid’s Modern

Deborah Krohn. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Wooden Furniture” appeared in Design and Heritage, edited by Rebecca Houze and Grace LeesMaffei (Routledge, 2022). My first book, Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, will be released in October 2022 with the MIT Press. The publication of this book has been supported by a production grant from the Graham Foundation. Related material, “Holz: Wood and the German Werkbund in 1933,” will be included in a special fall 2022 issue of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, devoted to the significance of nature in material and visual culture during the Third Reich.

A new course that I taught for Bard Graduate Center students in spring 2021, “Doll Parts: Human Forms in Material Culture and Design History,” has shifted my research focus: I am currently developing this topic both for my second book and for my 2025 Focus exhibition. I will be teaching my first exhibitionrelated course, “In Focus: Welcome to the Dolls’ House,” in the fall of 2022, while simultaneously pursuing this research as the fall semester’s Faculty in Focus. MIT Press has invited me to submit a proposal for the related book—Doll Parts: Designing Likeness—which I will be constructing this summer in conjunction with research at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Deborah Krohn

With travel and research on hold in 2020–21, it was the ideal time to put the finishing touches on various projects. I submitted final versions of two book chapters: one on a sixteenth-century French book of poems about the household and various furnishings for an anthology called Spaces of Making and Thinking edited by Colin Murray, Sophie Pittman (BGC MA ’13), and Tianna Uchaz; and a second called “Verbal Representations of Furniture in Early Modern Europe” for A Cultural History of Furniture in the Age of Exploration, to be published by Bloomsbury. I also drafted a book that will appear in conjunction with a Bard Graduate Center exhibition, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, that will open in February 2023. In fall 2020, I delivered a paper at an online conference sponsored jointly by the Newberry Library and the Folger on “Food and the Book,

1300–1800.” Perhaps most exciting, I was fortunate to appear alongside restaurateur and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi in a documentary called Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, filmed during an event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in summer 2018 for which I served as historical advisor. Though movie theaters were closed, the film was available on various platforms. I participated with the director and producer on numerous Zoom programs that followed screenings of the film for neighborhood and community groups all over the country.

Meredith Linn

In 2020–21, I was involved in several new teaching, writing, and resource creation projects. I co-created, co-organized, and cotaught the summer 2020 Lab for Teen Thinkers program with Carla Repice, Bard Graduate Center’s then-senior manager of education and engagement, and PhD student Tova Kadish. In response to the pandemic, we doubled the number of teens involved and shifted from an in-person to an all-online program. With the assistance of Jesse Merandy, I also created an extensive online resource of readings for the teens. With Catherine Whalen, I compiled a shared list of resources for the study of African American and African diasporic history and material culture. In fall 2020, I co-taught “Approaches” with Freyja Hartzell and designed and taught a new course called “Medical Materialities.” With Aaron Glass, I co-designed and co-convened the new “Unsettling Things” course in spring 2021, inviting many BGC colleagues and outside scholars to present their research and engage in conversations about applying critical perspectives to expand the study of objects. I also supervised Tova Kadish’s independent study about landscape analysis using geographic information system mapping.

Also in 2020–21, I established a new BGC internship with the Furniture History Society in collaboration with Adriana Turpin and again supervised the MA student internship process in the role of director of master’s studies. I also gave guest lectures in courses at the CUNY Graduate Center and City College and for BGC’s 2021 summer school for students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. For my BGC Work-in-Progress talk in fall 2020, I presented part of a paper about nineteenth-century patent medicines that I drafted for a special issue of the journal Historical Archaeology. During the 2020–2021 academic year, I co-authored, with Nan Rothschild and Diana diZerega Wall, a chapter about Seneca Village for the book Advocacy and Archaeology: Urban Intersections, edited by Kelly Britt and Diane George and

to be published by Berghahn Books. Additionally, I edited nine chapters contributed to Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, a book to be published by BGC based on the symposium of the same name I convened in the spring of 2020.

In 2021–22, I continued to work on the Lab for Teen Thinkers program, which ran as a hybrid program in the summer of 2021. Carla Repice and I also created three and ran two Seneca Village professional development workshops, collaborating with Marie Warsh of the Central Park Conservancy, Alice BaldwinJones, a food anthropologist and member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History, and graduates of the previous year’s teen program. Additionally, I worked with BGC student Laura Mogulescu to develop a flexible lesson plan about foodways and food-related artifacts at Seneca Village. The workshops and lesson plan were part of a project to create an exportable Seneca Village curriculum.

For BGC students, I taught two courses in the fall of 2021: “Excavating the Empire City” and “Archaeology of African American Communities.” The latter was a new course I designed with the goal of centering the work of African American scholars. This academic year, I supervised one dissertation defense (Rebecca Matheson), one PhD qualifying exam (Emma McClendon), two dissertation proposals (Adam Brandow and Tova Kadish), and one MA qualifying paper (Pim Supavarasuwat).

This spring, I have given several guest lectures in courses at Columbia University, the CUNY Graduate Center, and New York University, and one at the Irish Consulate for the African American and Irish Diaspora Network. This semester, I have been on pre-tenure sabbatical, revising my monograph about illness, injury, and healing among Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City and pulling together the last chapters of Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century.

François Louis

I spent 2020–21 socially distancing at home with my family in New Jersey. I offered two courses on Zoom: “Foreign Luxuries and Chinese Taste” and a new course on the art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (ca. 250 BCE to 8 CE), in which my students and I familiarized ourselves with the rich archaeological finds and scholarship of the past twenty years. At the end of the 2020–21 academic year, I concluded my tenure as director of doctoral studies, which

meant that I was able to offer four courses in 2021–22: those consisted of an immersion into tenth- to thirteenth-century archaeological materials of the Liao and the Song dynasties. These were followed by spring classes on gardens and on Shang and Zhou ornament. I gave talks on Liao archaeology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and on the Belitung shipwreck at Yale University. My 2003 article, “Shaping Symbols of Privilege: Precious Metals and the Early Liao Aristocracy,” was republished in 2021 in the fiftiethanniversary volume of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. Another article, “Metal Objects on the Tang Wreck,” has been translated into Chinese as part of the Chinese edition of the catalogue The Tang Shipwreck: Art and Exchange in the 9th Century. The book is edited by the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore and will hopefully be printed later this year. I am currently revising an article on “Qianlong’s Jue Tripods and Pre-Antiquarian Learning.”

Michele Majer

In 2020–21, I taught “Modes and Manners in the Eighteenth Century” and “Nineteenth-Century Fashion,” which provided a welcome distraction from the strangeness of the times. Both classes were mostly remote, but in spite of this lessthan-ideal situation, the journeys through these two centuries were stimulating and rewarding. Over the course of that year, I enjoyed getting to know two first-year students in Bard Graduate Center’s recently introduced “tutorials,” both of whom were in my fall 2020 and spring 2021 classes. In December 2020, I had an Instagram Live conversation with BGC alum Leigh Wishner (MA ’04), now at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, about one of my idols, Esther Williams. That month, I was also given the task of acquiring at auction a number of wonderful nineteenth-century garments on behalf of BGC for its Study Collection. In February 2021, I moderated the Modern Design History Seminar Series evening with guests Christopher Breward and Michelle Tolini Finamore (PhD ’10). In spring 2021, I advised two second-year students’ qualifying papers and one of my doctoral students, William DeGregorio (PhD ’21), successfully defended his dissertation, “Materializing Manners: Fashion, Period Rooms, and Gentility at the Museum of the City of New York, 1923–1958.” Since October 2020, I have been working with Emma Cormack (BGC associate curator, MA ’18) and Ilona Kos (Textilmuseum St. Gallen) as co-curator for an exhibition that will open at the BGC Gallery this fall, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. I’m very excited to be involved in this project, which will take me through—and slightly beyond—my retirement from the BGC faculty in June.