Bard Graduate Center Gallery

A lecture by Edward González-Tennant (Texas State University) Historical archaeologists are uniquely positioned to explore hidden histories—those events erased or otherwise obfuscated in the present—by facilitating a nuanced understanding of the past and its legacies in the present. This presentation explores how a range of digital technologies support archaeological reclamation, an emerging approach that positions archaeological expertise at the service of communities and the public. Dr. González-Tennant discusses several case studies from Florida and Texas to provide concrete examples of this community-centered approach to historical archaeology. These case studies illustrate the centrality of digital technologies—e.g., GIS (geographic information systems), GPR (ground penetrating radar), LiDAR (light detection and ranging), photogrammetry, and VR (virtual reality)—in revealing new historical truths that facilitate public dialogue and engagement. By examining the intersections between technology, community, and historical memory, González-Tennant seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations about the role of archaeology in promoting restorative justice and reconciliation. An Archaeological Encounters Lecture Edward González-Tennant earned his PhD from the University of Florida for pioneering work applying digital and virtual archaeological methods to explore the history of Rosewood, Florida. He is currently an assistant professor of historical archaeology at the Texas State University, where he directs the newly established Texas State Computational and Digital Archaeology Lab (CDAL).

A lecture by Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia) In 869 CE, thousands of East African agricultural slaves rebelled in the southern Iraqi city of Basra and formed an independent state that fell to the Abbasids fourteen years later. A generation or two after, a small collective of Muslim philosophers based in Basra composed a revolutionary, anti-slavery treatise. In this lecture, Kristina Richardson will trace the development of abolitionist philosophies from the ninth-century slave revolt to the tenth-century treatise and beyond, offering an original excavation of medieval abolitionist thought. A Global Middle Ages Lecture Kristina Richardson is professor of history and Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: _Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World_ (2012) and _Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration_ (2022). She also co-edited the _Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver_ in 2021. She is currently writing a book called _Black Basra_ on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq.

A lecture by Risham Majeed (Ithaca College) Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is widely celebrated as a draughtsman, architect, and restorer of medieval buildings. A national hero in France, Viollet-le-Duc tends to be plucked out of the complex nexus of colonialism and nationalism which molded much of his thinking. Indeed, Viollet-le-Duc’s friendship with Arthur de Gobineau, who wrote the _Essay on the Inequality of the Races,_ is understudied given that Gobineau’s theories of race inflected the architect-scholar’s thinking from the 1850s until his death in 1878. Such theories of racial development allowed comparisons between the “primitive” nature of the medieval and the “primitive” quality assigned to the art newly introduced to Western Europe by colonization. In this lecture, Risham Majeed examines how medieval sculpture came to be racialized and understood as “primitive” and “originary” through Viollet-le-Duc’s design for its display in the museums of the Trocadéro Palace (1878–1937). A Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture Lee Anderson, who worked for a time as an arts education teacher, has been referred to as the godfather of the Gothic revival in America. It is largely because of his impressive personal collection that the style has been rekindled among designers and other tastemakers. Lee passed away in 2010, but he left a legacy of philanthropic support through the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation, whose mission is to support programs and organizations that advance an appreciation for the decorative arts. This event is presented in conjunction with Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds, on view at the BGC Gallery through May 24. Risham Majeed (PhD, Columbia University) was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and grew up in Saudi Arabia and London. She specializes in medieval art in Western Europe and the historical arts of Africa. Her research has revealed the parallel reception of the two fields during the emergence of art history as a discipline, which is the topic of her book project, _Primitive Before Primitivism: Medieval and African Art in the 19th Century._ Current projects include an examination of sub-Saharan Africa in conversation with Asia and Europe during the medieval period, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is also curating an exhibition, _Africa in the World: materials without end,_ which will open at the Handwerker Gallery in March 2026.

A conversation with Jessica Murphy (independent researcher) and Andreas Keller (Olfactory Art Keller) Join us for a conversation between two pioneering scholars who are changing the way we experience art through our most evocative sense, smell. Andreas Keller and Jessica Murphy will share their experiments in olfactory design: how smells can invite new interpretations, provide sensorial context, and enhance aesthetic appreciation for the museumgoer or gallery visitor. Keller will focus on how he works with artists to include scents in their creations; the resulting work, he argues, prompts a slower, embodied way of interacting with art. Murphy will discuss her method of crafting museum tours that combine visual and olfactory elements, always starting with a critical question: for example, how might an eighteenth-century potpourri vessel have smelled? Theodora Brown (MA ’26) will moderate the conversation. Jessica Murphy is a museum professional and fragrance historian whose work connects art, scent, and popular culture. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Delaware and has worked in research positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As manager of visitor engagement at the Brooklyn Museum, she created a series of scented gallery tours of special exhibitions and permanent collections from 2019 to 2025. She has lectured about fragrance through cultural venues including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Timken Museum of Art (San Diego), and the Institute for Art and Olfaction (Los Angeles). Her writing about fragrance has appeared in _Atlas Obscura, Olfactive Material,_ and _Viscose Journal,_ and she has been interviewed about perfume by media outlets including _Vogue,_ the _New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, InStyle, Glamour,_ and _Harper’s Bazaar._ She shares her insights on olfactory and visual topics at her Substack, Show & Smell, and is currently a resident scholar at the New York Public Library’s Center for Research in the Humanities, where she is working on a book project related to fragrance. Andreas Keller, author of _The Philosophy of Olfactory Perception,_ is an academic with PhDs in neuroscience and philosophy who is interested in smells. He was the owner and operator of Olfactory Art Keller, an art gallery in New York’s Chinatown that encouraged artists working in all mediums to experiment with scents as objects of aesthetic appreciation by providing a dedicated exhibition space for olfactory art.

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A Ravi and Seran Trehan Lecture in the Arts of the Islamic World by Edhem Eldem (Columbia University) This lecture explores a link between Evliya Çelebi’s frequent references to the myth of Queen Kaydafe and Ahmedi’s late fourteenth-century _İskendername_ (Book of Alexander), and it unveils the complex and unexpected ways in which Ahmedi adapted and radically changed the age-old _Alexander Romance._ In Ahmedi’s telling, Queen Kaydafe stands in for Candace, whose confrontation with Alexander appears in every version of the _Romance,_ East and West. Yet Ahmedi’s _İskendername_ is the first work where the story’s universal “happy ending” turns into a tragedy, fatal to Kaydafe/Candace. Digging through layers of earlier and later texts, Eldem’s investigation reveals how Ahmedi came up with this innovative—and misogynist—twist and laid the foundation for a new and original version of the story, which would spread throughout Ottoman culture and literature at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Edhem Eldem (PhD Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, 1989) is a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and the Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor in the history department at Columbia University. He has taught in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University and at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and the École Normale Supérieure. In addition, he has held the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the Collège de France, and he has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His fields of interest include the Levant trade in the eighteenth century, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the development of an urban bourgeoisie in Istanbul, the history of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire, late nineteenth-century Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies, Westernization and the _Tanzimat,_ and Orientalism. His publications include _French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century_ (1999); _A History of the Ottoman Bank_ (1999); _The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul_ (1999, with D. Goffman and B. Masters); _Pride and Privilege. A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations_ (2004); _Death in Istanbul. Death and Its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture_ (2005); _Consuming the Orient_ (2007); _Un Ottoman en Orient. Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak (1869–1871)_ (2010); _Le voyage à Nemrud Dağı d’Osman Hamdi Bey et Osgan Efendi_ (2010); _Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914_ (2011, with Z. Bahrani and Z. Çelik); _Camera Ottomana. Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1870–1914_ (2015, with Z. Çelik); _L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident_ (2018); _L’Alhambra. À la croisée des histoires_ (2021); _L’Empire ottoman_ (2022); _The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History_ (2024).