Matthew Vollgraff

About Me

I am a historian of science, media, and visual culture, with a focus on modern Germany and its global entanglements. I have held research appointments and fellowships at eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel; the Warburg Institute, University of London; the University of Hamburg; and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. As a Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, I am a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project, sponsored by the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich.

My research explores how art and visual media have shaped scientific understandings of culture, the mind, and human history. My first book examines how the emerging study and display of “world art” in Wilhelmine Germany were intertwined with the objectives of imperial “world policy.” My forthcoming second book narrates the rise and fall of a transdisciplinary science of expressive gesture in interwar Germany, uncovering its impact on modernist culture’s relationship to the body, technology, and the irrational.

My current project investigates the modern politics of the deep past, asking how art and material culture have been mobilized as scientific evidence of global migration and cultural contact. Titled The Diffusionists: Art, Race, and the the First Global Turn, the book situates anthropological theories and practices of mapping cultural diffusion within wider debates about race, indigeneity, and sovereignty from the Great War to the Cold War.

Publications

Monographs

• The Imperial Childhood of World Art. Cultural Histories of the Material World Series. Bard Graduate Center, forthcoming in 2025.
• The Science of Expression: Emotion, Technology and German Modernity. Zone Books, under contract.

Edited Volumes and Special Issues

• Imagining Lost Origins: Art, Archaeology, and the Modern Politics of Ancient Migration, co-edited with Frederika Tevebring. Rethinking Art’s Histories Series. University of Manchester Press, under contract.
• Stella Kramrisch and the Transculturation of Art History, Special Issue co-edited with Jo Ziebritzki, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual 5, no. 4 (2024).
• Art and Environment in the Third Reich, Special Issue co-edited with Gregory Bryda, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85, no. 3 (2022).
• Ökologien des Ausdrucks (Ecologies of Expression), co-edited with Frank Fehrenbach. De Gruyter, 2022).

Articles

• “Ethnopsychology in the Bismarck Archipelago: Richard Thurnwald and the visual anthropology of German colonialism” History of the Human Sciences 37, no. 5 (2024), 68–98.
• “The Reflex Republic: Physiologies of Art in the Early Soviet Union.” October 188 (2024): 149–174.
• “Before Mnemosyne: Wilhelmine Cultural History Exhibitions and the Genesis of Warburg’s Picture Atlas.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities 47, no. 4 (2024) 432–465.
• “Biotechnics and Politics. A Genealogy of Nonhuman Technology” (with Marco Tamborini). History of Science 62, no. 3 (2024), 366–90.
• “The Origins of Art around 1900. Gesture, Drawing, and the Ethnographic Imagination.” Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, Volume 77-78 (2022), 15–30.
• “Introduction: Race and Landscape in Nazi Germany.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85, no. 3 (2022), 289–308.
• “Zwischensphären. Helmuth Plessners und Frederik Buytendijks ökologische Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks.” Ökologien des Ausdrucks, ed. Matthew Vollgraff and Frank Fehrenbach (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 57–88.
• “‘Dinamicheskaia poliarizatsia posredstvom vosstanovlennogo vospominania’: energeticheskaia psikhoistoria Abi Varburga.” [Dynamic Polarization through Restored Memory: Aby Warburg’s Energetic Psychohistory], Energia: transformatsii sily, metamorfozy ponjatia, ed. Ilya Kalinin, Jurij Murašov and Susanne Strätling (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022), 140–162.
• “Die Pflanze als Erfinder. Raoul Francé, die Biotechnik und die Avantgarde der Zwischenkriegszeit.” Form- und Bewegungskräfte in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, ed. Lutz Hengst, Frank Fehrenbach, Frederike Middelhoff and Cornelia Zumbusch (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2021), 253–291.
• “L’arc de l’histoire. De l’anthropologie diffusionniste à la morphologie des cultures.” La Part de l’Œil, Issue 35–36: ‘André Leroi-Gourhan et l’esthétique / Art et anthropologie’ (2021), 378–399.
• “The Archaeology of Expression: Aby Warburg’s Ausdruckskunde.” Aby Warburg und die Natur, ed. Frank Fehrenbach and Cornelia Zumbusch (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 121–148.
• “Vegetal Gestures. Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany.” Grey Room, Issue 72 (Summer 2018), 68–93. Translated as: “Gestes végétaux. Le cinéma et la connaissance de la vie dans l’Allemagne de Weimar.” Puissances du végétal, ed. Teresa Castro, Perig Pitrou and Marie Rebecchi (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2020), 195–223.
• “Intersecting Lines: Sergei Eisenstein Writes to Ludwig Klages.” Critical Quarterly, Volume 58, Issue 4 (February 2017), 113–122.
• “The Archive and the Labyrinth: On the Contemporary Bilderatlas.” October, Issue 149 (Summer 2014), 143–158.

Catalogue Essays

• “‘With the Eyes of an Anthropologist.’ Aby Warburg and the Bureau of American Ethnology,” in Lightning Symbol and Snake Dance. Aby Warburg and Pueblo Art, ed. Christine Chávez and Uwe Fleckner (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022), 51–57.
• “The Library of Life. Mies’s Work and Biology” / “Die Bibliothek des Lebens. Mies’ Werk und die Biologie.” Lehmbruck - Kolbe - Mies van der Rohe. Künstliche Biotope / Artificial Biotopes, ed. Sylvia Martin und Julia Wallner (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2021), 195–217.

Reviews

• “Faustian Bargains: The Legends and Legacies of German ‘Liberal Ethnology’” [Review of H. Glenn Penny, Im Schatten Humboldts. Eine tragische Geschichte der deutschen Ethnologie], History of Anthropology Review, Volume 44.
• “Seductio ad Absurdum” [Review of Matthew Rampley, The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience], Oxford Art Journal, Volume 43, Issue 1 (March 2020), 152–155.
• Review: Barbara Wittmann, Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien: Eine Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte der Kinderzeichung, 1500–1950. Blog of the Bilderfahrzeuge Research Group. April 8, 2019.
• “Specters of the Primitive. A Review in Three Parts.” Blog of the Bilderfahrzeuge Research Group. December 9, 2019.

Translations

• “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology” [annotated translation of a 1924 essay by Hugo Ball]. October, Issue 146 (Fall 2013), 65–92.
  With “Afterword: Hugo Ball’s *Political Theology.” October, Issue 146 (Fall 2013), 93–96.