As a Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, Matthew Vollgraff is a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project, sponsored by the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich. He is a historian of science, media, and visual culture, with a focus on modern Germany and its global entanglements. He has 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.
Matthew’s research explores how art and visual media have shaped scientific understandings of culture, the mind, and human history. His first book examines how the emerging study and display of “world art” in Wilhelmine Germany were intertwined with the objectives of imperial “world policy.” His 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.
Matthew’s 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.
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.
Journal Articles (Selected)
“Ethnopsychology in the Bismarck Archipelago: Richard Thurnwald and the Visual Culture 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), 149–74.
“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.” Co-authored 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 77–78 (2022), 15–30.
“Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany.” Grey Room 72 (2018), 68–93.
