Matthew Vollgraff

About Me

I am a cultural historian of science and media with a focus on modern central Europe. My research deals with the intersecting histories of anthropology, psychology, and the legacies of colonialism. I am particularly interested in how visual media practices inform scientific knowledge about culture and the mind. I am currently a research associate at the Warburg Institute, University of London, where I am a member of the Bilderfahrzeuge project. I received my PhD from Princeton University in 2019. Originally trained as a Germanist with a background in literary studies, I take an interdisciplinary approach to the epistemic transfers between the arts, humanities and the natural sciences. Below are a few of my major research strands.

The Science of Expression

Based on my 2019 dissertation, my current book manuscript provides the first 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

More recently, I have been concerned with how the reception and interpretation of non-Western art and artifacts have unfolded in relation to colonial ideologies and institutions. My forthcoming first monograph, The Imperial Childhood of World Art reconstructs the first exhibition of global 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 revises the genealogy of “global art history” while intervening in contemporary debates around Eurocentrism and the universal museum.

Other texts of mine have addressed topics such as the ethnopsychological analysis of indigenous drawings in German Melanesia, and the art historian Aby Warburg’s interactions with the Bureau of American Ethnology. 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

Another major strand of my research addresses the aesthetic and political roles that nonhuman nature, ecological systems, and organic form have played in twentieth-century Germany. With Gregory Bryda, I co-edited a 2022 special issue of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte on Art and Environment in the Third Reich, which brings together scholars from both medieval and modern periods to offer new perspectives on the representation and manipulation of nature under fascism. I have also published on themes from vegetal vitalism in Weimar cinema and philosophy, to the place of anti-Darwinist biology and natural philosophy in the thought of the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe.

Migration as Method: Diffusionism and the Global Politics of Prehistory

During the period between 1890 and 1940, archaeologists and anthropologists developed a common method to model and visualize cultural origins by reconstructing the movements of artifacts, bodies, and customs across geographical space. My current long-term project examines the circulation of this diffusionist method, and the migrationist narratives it helped create, across disciplines and national institutions. Focusing on scholars in Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States, “Migration as Method” shows how their research into global prehistory developed in response to very contemporary motivations and concerns: globalization, nationalism, imperial expansion, capitalist trade networks, world war, diaspora, race and immigration. As I argue, these scientists’ ideas and theories about cultural diffusion and mobility continue to shape the way we navigate questions of national identity and ‘origins’ in today’s postcolonial world, bearing on issues that range from the legacies of genocide to debates over indigenous land rights.

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 by Gregory Bryda, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85, no. 3 (2022).

Articles

• “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.