Matthew Vollgraff

Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1

20146 Hamburg
Room 116 (Main Building)
Tel.: +49 404 2838
E-Mail: matthew.vollgraff"AT"uni-hamburg.de

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Research project

Matthew's dissertation, The Science of Expression in Germany, 1888-1933, traces the emergence in the early 20th century of 'Ausdruckskunde', an interdisciplinary field that radically problematized the relations between form, affect and instinct. Responding to pressures from the nascent cinema and of evolutionary theory, the body's gestures were interpreted as a medium of aesthetic, psychological and deep historical knowledge. Traversing the work of Aby Warburg, Ludwig Klages, Helmuth Plessner, Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Karl Bühler and others, The Science of Expression examines how these diverse figures confronted the enigma of expression—a “primordial phenomenon of life,” according to Max Scheler—which then as now poses an irreducible challenge to the traditional distinctions between body and mind, animal and human, nature and culture.

 Vita

Matthew Vollgraff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of German at Princeton University, where he has been a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) since 2013. Before coming to Princeton, he studied Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 2010) and the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. From 2014-2016 he was a visiting doctoral fellow at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin. He has been the grateful recipient of a DAAD research grant (2014-15) and Princeton's Hyde Fellowship (2015-16).

 Relevant Publications

 "The Archeology of Expression: Aby Warburg's Ausdruckskunde" in: Cornelia Zumbusch/Frank Fehrenbach (ed.), Aby Warburg und die Natur (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2017).

 “The Archive and the Labyrinth: On the Contemporary Bilderatlas,” October 149 (Summer 2014).