Robert Vogt is a historian of art and research associate at the University of St. Gallen. While he teaches broadly on various aspects of the history of art, his research is primarily focused on premodern, especially medieval art in the Mediterranean world, its global entanglements and local specificities. It equally addresses object and visual studies, draws on histories of science and medicine, the senses and the environment. He is particularly interested in historiographically marginalized, mostly mobile artefacts, such as the complex spherical metalworks—censers, hand warmers, and mechanical marvels—at the core of his dissertation, changes in their make, meaning, and use in religious, courtly, and scientific contexts.
Prior to joining the University of St.Gallen, he worked at Johns Hopkins University, where he is currently completing his PhD, and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. He held research positions at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, was a fellow at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art in Paris and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York. His writing has, amongst others, appeared in The Burlington Magazine and his art criticism has been broadcasted on Arte, where he worked as freelance cultural journalist during his studies in comparative literature and art history that took him from Germany and France to Italy and the United States. He furthermore gained curatorial insights working with curators of large international loan exhibitions in New York and Baltimore, served on a committee of the International Center of Medieval Art, as a PhD representative at the Max Planck Institute in Florence, and as a lecture series co-organizer at the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.