Matthew Vollgraff

About Me

I am a cultural historian specializing in the science, politics, and visual culture of modern central Europe. My work examines how images and optical media have informed the production of knowledge about the body, nature, and human history between 1850 and 1950. I completed my PhD in German at Princeton University in 2019 and have held academic appointments at the Warburg Institute, University of London; the University of Hamburg; and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. I am currently NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel. Below are some of my principal areas of research:

The Science of Expression

I am currently completing a manuscript on the history of Ausdruckskunde, a subversive science of expressive gesture that developed in early twentieth-century Germany. Through a series of interdisciplinary encounters, The Science of Expression reveals how art historians, philosophers, biologists, psychologists and filmmakers worked together to construct an alternative epistemology of somatic expressivity: a phenomenon that then as now unsettles distinctions between nature and culture, mind and body, human and nonhuman. Drawing on new archival sources and encompassing figures like Aby Warburg, Helmuth Plessner, and Sergei Eisenstein, the book demonstrates how this heterodox inquiry into expressiveness harnessed techniques of scientific rationalization in pursuit of the unalienated experience of bodily knowledge.

Ökologien des Ausdrucks (Ecologies of Expression), a 2022 volume co-edited with Frank Fehrenbach, explores some of the wider methodological ramifications of the science of expression for reimagining the interwoven histories of art and science today.

Anthropology, Aesthetics, Colonialism

Forthcoming with the Bard Graduate Center, my monograph The Imperial Childhood of World Art reconstructs the first exhibition of world art history in Germany, organized by the historian Karl Lamprecht in 1914. Situating this exhibition within the wider context of German historical scholarship, scientific racism and imperial world policy on the eve of the First World War, the book proposes an alternative genealogy of contemporary global art history that emerges from the conflicted encounter between Enlightenment ideals and colonial dynamics.

From 2021 to 2022 I co-convened the working group on Colonial Science in the German Empire at the Consortium for Science, Technology and Medicine. I have been an associate editor of the History of Anthropology Review since 2022.

Nature, Technology, Politics

Other work of mine has addressed twentieth-century German perspectives on nonhuman nature, ecological systems, and organic form. With Gregory Bryda, I co-edited a 2022 special issue of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte on Art and Environment in the Third Reich, on the representation and manipulation of nature under fascism. Related publications have dealt with vegetal vitalism in Weimar cinema and philosophy, Mies van der Rohe’s reception of anti-Darwinist biology and natural philosophy, and (with Marco Tamborini) an essay on relationship between German politics and modern ideas about nonhuman technology.

Migration as Method: Diffusionism and the Global Politics of the Deep Past, 1890–1960

During the period between 1890 and 1960, archaeologists and anthropologists developed a common method to model and visualize cultural origins. By comparing far-flung artifacts, ideas and practices, they aimed to reconstruct the ancient migrations of peoples and cultures on a global scale. Widely known under the name of ‘diffusionism’, this method itself quickly diffused across disciplines and national institutions, especially in Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain, the United States and Mexico. My current project investigates how the search for culture contacts in the deep past responded to very contemporary motivations and concerns, including nationalism, colonization, world wars, imperial expansion, diaspora, and forced migration. The project aims to unpack the ambivalent legacy of these early twentieth-century theories of cultural diffusion, which continue to inform discussions around migration, identity and belonging today.

A first iteration of this project was a 2021 essay detailing the history of diffusionist anthropology and cultural morphology in Germany. Together with Frederika Tevebring, I convene the research network ‘Migrating Prehistories’, based at King’s College, London, and the Warburg Institute.

Below are some of my publications. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like to get in touch.

Selected Publications

Edited Volumes

• Ökologien des Ausdrucks (Ecologies of Expression), co-edited with Frank Fehrenbach (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022).
• Art and Environment in the Third Reich, Special Issue co-edited with Gregory Bryda, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85, no. 3 (2022).

Articles

• “Before Mnemosyne: Wilhelmine Cultural History Exhibitions and the Genesis of Warburg’s Picture Atlas.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities (2024): Early View.
• “Biotechnics and Politics. A Genealogy of Nonhuman Technology” (with Marco Tamborini). History of Science (2023): OnlineFirst.
• “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. *The ‘Political’ was inexplicably removed by the editor just before the piece went to print.