Marking its Twentieth Birthday, this symposium examines the elements of practice and theory that have come to define the Bard Graduate Center. An array of speakers from across the national, disciplinary, and institutional spectrum will put the achievements of the past twenty years in context, and also outline paths into the future. The morning session will concentrate on issues relevant to the future of exhibitions, examining display and interpretation, publishing and the digital challenge, and how philosophy might inform museum practice, while the afternoon focuses on the role of the research institute, ways of defining good research, research as a way of life, and the necessity of research for teaching.
Susan Weber
Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center
Welcome


Morning Session
Nina Stritzler-Levine
Director, Bard Graduate Center Gallery/Gallery Publications
Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going From Here


Taco Dibbits
Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamPlayful Simplicity: The Making of the New Rijksmuseum



Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, Architecture & Design, and Director, Research and Development, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Exhibitions for the Real World: Contemporary Design at MoMA



Jill Shaw
Co-General Editor, Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), and Research Associate, Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago
Meta-Monet: The Journey from Print to Digital at The Art Institute of Chicago



Garry Hagberg
James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics, Bard College
Word and Object

Ivan Gaskell
Professor, Curator and Head of the Focus Gallery, Bard Graduate Center
The Museum of Big Ideas



Panel Discussion



Afternoon Session
Peter N. Miller
Dean and Professor, Bard Graduate Center
Basic Research as the Life-Giving Force in Humanities Teaching and Scholarship


Norton Batkin
Vice President and Dean of Graduate Studies; Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art History; Director, Philosophy Program; Bard College
BGC at Forty



Joachim Nettelbeck
Former Secretary of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin)
The Administration of Serendipity: What is a Research Institute?


Harriet Zuckerman
Professor Emerita of Sociology, Columbia University, and Senior Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Basic Research with Potentials of Relevance


Michael Shanks
Professor of Classics and Classical Archaeology, Stanford University
Research as Performance


Larry Wolff
Professor of History and Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University
Research and Teaching: Against the Idea of the Two Cultures